It's just a waiting game

Photography seems to be a brilliant metaphor for life to me. It's all about biding your time for the perfect combination of factors to come together so you can create something beautiful. Most of the time it doesn't quite work, and you can see some way to improve what you've done. But the important thing is that you've had a chance to learn, and as a result you'll improve as a photographer.

Most people don't have an infinite amount of time to wait however. Some of us only have a matter of minutes to get the shot, whereas others have days or weeks in which to get something which could be considered a respectable outcome. Some people thrive on this sort of time-pressure, and others just crumble, and waste more time worrying about how they'll handle having so little time, wasting yet more of what little time they indeed have.

(This one of the things which really annoys me about most so-called photographers. They spend more time researching and buying gear than they do using it, and then barely push the ridiculously expensive things they do buy to the limits. Now I'm not saying that it's completely the photographer, good gear does ease the picture-making process by quite a considerable margin, but it's hardly the be all and end all. I won't go any further, as so many people have already said this before me as to render anyone adding anything more to the point utterly pointless, but suffice to say that it bugs me to see people buying £3000 cameras and then never taking it off the manufacturer's default settings.)

Anyway, back to my original point...

Photography lets me see more clearly. And the clearer I can see the better a photographer I can be. It's a nice little predictable cycle, and a little predictability is a nice thing in a world where you can seemingly rely on so little to still be there if you turn your back.

Photography is far more reliable than the train I was stuck waiting for when I took this. 33 minutes late. Fucking useless.



And oh yeah - Merry Christmas