Learning Something New is Great (Photography This Time Around)

I am starting to take up photography semi-seriously. I bought a pretty nice DSLR and started a class at the Chicago Photography Center last week. I just love it! I’ve been re-realizing they joy that can be found from learning something new (I previously never knew anything about photography other than point-and-click … I had never even thought about aperture, shutter-speed or light until recently).

When learning something new, learning the initial basics opens up a whole new world. After that, you only learn details. Actually, the more you learn in something, the more you realize that you don’t know. But still, the basics are the foundation for everything in most subjects. After learning the basics, all you can do is learn more details and fine tune your craft. For a given craft, after doing it for a while, it can be so easy to get into a rut and do the same thing over and over and lose a sense of creativity.

One interesting thing that has become aware to me on this adventure is the skill-level that most magazines are written to. For magazine publishers, it is probably difficult to decide to cater to the beginners, the pros, or somewhere in between. I think they tend to lean towards the “in between”. I had never cracked a photography magazine in my life until about six weeks ago. They are mostly overwhelming to read at the moment for me because the jargon is so foreign to me (but it is great … you learn a ton very quickly at this stage of learning). But on the opposite end of the learning spectrum, reading magazines on a subject where I lean more towards the “pro” side can also be extremely frustrating. Take the current Java magazines. I open one of those and just roll my eyes. It seems like they go over the most basic stuff over and over again and introduce “brand new” frameworks that I was using 3 years ago. But then I remember the first time that I cracked open of those Java rags around 1998 and having trouble reading it because I was just getting used to the jargon in that world.

Anyway, I think that I was lead indirectly to photography by reading and semi-doing The Artist’s Way (I’ve been real good about the writing part of TAW, but I haven’t done much of the other stuff). If you feel creatively in a rut, check it out.

Anyway, I hope that photography continues to be fun for a while, and when that gets mundane, maybe I’ll have a new spark when I return to other creative adventures!