Two of my favorite hobbies are playing mandolin and taking pictures. I am pretty much self-taught in both fields. My problem is, I feel like I hit a wall where practice and research are not enough. I want to get better, and the only way is to learn from the best. I want to hang around incredible professional mandolin players and professional photographers. I want to ask them questions and learn from them to improve my own abilities. This is especially true in photography. I see incredible architectural photography that blows me away, and I have no idea how they do it. Well, I know that it is a combination of composition, good gear, lighting, and photoshop. But I want specifics, and I want them now. Does anyone else have this problem? It’s like I can’t teach myself anything else. I like to look at people’s eyes in studio pictures to see how many flashes or softboxes the photographer was using. I screw around in Photoshop for hours on end to try to make a picture look better. But it’s a huge puzzle of possible steps, and I can never fit all the pieces together in the right order to make it complete. It’s very frustrating. In fact, it’s so frustrating that it makes me want to kick a thin board in half like I used to in karate in 4th grade.
August 21, 2008
