Montreal on a rainy day

I finally received my camera, sniped off of ebay for $150 US. I will treasure it and take care of it as its previous owner has obviously done. In return, it’ll baby walk me through the first few steps on the path to mastery with photography.
With the P850 in hand, taking picture has changed its meaning. I stand out from the random crowd as I crouch into position before pulling the trigger. Interaction between strangers increased and intensifies as people inquire about the objective, the weather and whatever they fancy talking about with someone handling a camera. Some of them got angry at me, but most are just curious as to what I am doing.

“Rien, je m’entraÃ®ne Ã prendre des photos.” Une simple vÃ©ritÃ©.

4 Responses to "Montreal on a rainy day"

Jeff says:

March 20, 2007 at 8:40 pm

Like Tai Chi, I don’t think it’s possible to master photography. The more you learn, the more you realize that there’s always something to improve. You may try to specialize in one field, such as sports photography, wildlife photography, macro photography, black-and-white photography, portrait photography, landscape photography, infrared photography, or even super-specialized fields like aerial/panoramic photography, wedding photography, or photo-journalism, but mastering photography in general would require several lifetimes.

That’s not including all the skills that make up digital post-processing. Even film photography offers a different perspective (especially large-format cameras with costly exposures), and developing negatives opens up a whole new field of options.

Or even consider using a rangefinder camera (which is incomparable to SLR or point-and-shoot), like a Leica, or a distorted camera like a Lomo. The number of things to learn goes up exponentially.

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Causalien says:

March 20, 2007 at 9:44 pm

I believe that we differ in the meaning of mastery. It is but an idea in my mind of what a person is like and am able to do when mastery is reached. When I am close to reaching that goal, I will then redefine the goal. Just like you\’ve redefined yours into different specialization. Your mastery, is not the mastery I seek.

After thinking about it more. I think the differences comes from why we use the word mastery. My reason, is to setup an end result that I can look forward to becoming in order to create more enthusiasm.

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Jeff says:

March 21, 2007 at 7:29 pm

I don’t really define mastery into specializations; it’s just a convenient way for me to organize something that is very difficult to master. For example, it’d be easy to master something like Wii bowling, where people can just keep doing the same thing over and over again and winning. In contrast, it’d be hard to master something like chess, which has so much depth to it.

When you say “an end result that I can look forward to becoming in order to create more enthusiasm”, doesn’t that contract itself? Like with dancing, if there was an end result, wouldn’t that mean there would be nowhere to go? I think it’s having no end result that’s encouraging to learn more. I would think that you don’t want an end result cause that would mean there’s no more to learn, unless you’re talking about a certain level of skill. Is this what you mean?

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Causalien says:

March 21, 2007 at 8:50 pm

I’ve investigated in the best way to drive towards a goal. Human psychology works best when there’s a goal in sight that’s not impossible or too easy. On one end, I want to keep my enthusiasm up by knowing that something is possible, on another, I don’t want to clutter my mind by splitting a goal into too many small steps. Both make the task seem more impossible to reach.

So I define a reachable goal with an end and when I am 90% there, I sit down and redefine an end result I want. This is why, there’s a contradiction. Yes, the contradiction exist in the semantic and logics of it, but figuring it out won’t help me achieve the outcome I want.

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Montreal on a rainy day

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