Reminiscing...


As I was getting 2023 started by doing some housekeeping in my photo catalog by moving some last 2022 projects off to their archive locations, I inevitably began looking through some images from previous years. I looked all the way back to the first entry in my catalog, which was a personal project from January of 2013. Very fitting timing since it is currently January of 2023. The images in this part of my catalog are now 10 years old and represented my first attempt at a personal project as an aspiring photographer, still trying to figure out the basics. Many photographers would probably agree that looking back through their images as a beginner can at times, be a cringeworthy experience. I can report that it was no different for me. For context, I had just bought my first DSLR camera and a couple of lenses about two months before those January 2013 photos were taken, with the goal of learning all that I could about photography. Like many new photographers, I innocently had it in my mind that I would just watch a few online videos and with a little practice, I could be a pro in six months! I am here to tell you from a decade of personal experience, that is not how it works which subsequently formed the inspiration for this post. This brings us to the photo on the cover of this post and shown again below.

The photo is of the tail section of a B-29 bomber known as Bockscar, that is on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. It is not just any B-29, this is the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki during World War II. It is also one of the photos from that January 2013 project that I referenced earlier. As I look at the photo today, 10 years later; I will be the first to admit that it is a very average photo at best. My catalog allows me to look back at the camera settings when it was taken as well as all of the post-production adjustments I made to it. The cringeworthy experience I mentioned above comes into play here because the settings used to make it had "beginner" written all over them and are not at all what I would use today to capture the same scene. However, the reason this photo is still important to me today is because at the time I made the image, I was very proud of it. I got the dramatic exposure I was trying to get, it was in focus, and I was able to use the limited processing knowledge that I had at the time to be able to turn out a finished image. It gave me a little more confidence in my ability and allowed me to imagine what I could do in the future if I kept learning and practicing.


I went into that project with my couple of months of practice with my camera and the high hopes that I was going to get home and turn out an incredible batch of professional level images. Needless to say, that is not what I got. Many of my images from that project suffered from exposure issues, poor composition, and motion blur. The image above was really the only one that got anywhere close to what I had envisioned going into it. While I was disappointed with the overall results, it served as a valuable reality check that only helped me over the last decade behind a camera. I saw that my previous expectation of using a few online videos to become a pro in six months was not only comical but also completely impractical. Thankfully, it did not discourage me very much. Instead it helped me realize just how much I did not know yet about photography which set me out in pursuit of more extensive education and experimentation. This set the stage for many future projects that took me into new challenging shooting scenarios where mistakes would be made, lessons would be learned, and further education would be sought out to help me to continue improve.


Thankfully, 10 years later, those challenges and mistakes are much more rare. It is a simple fact that there is no point where there are no longer challenges or occasional mistakes for even the best of us. One of the aspects that I love about photography is that the learning never stops. There are always new unique challenges that can arise. What is different for an experienced photographer versus a new photographer is that the experience brings with it, the technical knowledge and ability to problem solve at a much higher level in real time, allowing the challenge to be overcome in the moment to still produce a good result rather than seeking out answers after the fact when it becomes apparent that something did not work as expected.


My advice to someone that may be just starting out today or even thinking about it, is to not be discouraged when faced with these realizations. It is best to embrace them and use them as the motivation to push further and have an open mind to keep learning and practicing. That mindset should really apply to all aspects of our lives. There is nothing more frustrating than meeting that person who has the belief that they know all there is to know about a topic and anything that you know that differs from what they know is wrong. That mindset only serves to limit a person's knowledge and ability by preventing them from exploring or experimenting with new ideas which effectively shuts down any opportunity for creativity or innovation. Could you imagine what the world of photography would look like today if it was devoid of creativity and innovation? Keep learning, practicing, and exploring!