The great comedian Jack Benny was fond of telling a joke about Carnegie Hall.  “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”  The answer: “Practice, practice, practice”

The same is true with photography, or for that matter anything that takes work to get better at. The Internet is flooded with millions of photographs that are … well, not very good, because they are not what was originally in the mind’s eye of the photographer when the picture was made.

That is not an indictment of the pictures or those who took them. What I am trying to say is that it doesn’t always work out as intended, even with the best of intentions.
Ansel Adams said, “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Think about that for a moment. Adams made thousands of images most of us would die for, yet very few made the cut. We all want more than a dozen a year but lets be honest with ourselves; are they really good, or in other words are they truly what we had in our mind’s eye when we made them?

What will give you or me a fighting chance to get to the Promised Land? Well guess what; before you hit pay dirt you need to kiss a lot of frogs, or make a lot of pictures, unless you have the special gift that most of us don’t have.

We all lead busy lives so I am going to go out on a limb and say that if you can’t be constantly out and about with your camera you need to keep your head in the game. Most of us work and have many obligations that somehow get in the way of what we want to be doing. I try to keep my head in the game when not photographing or being in my darkroom by reading as much as I can, looking at books by photographers I admire, practicing indoors without film in the camera or going to exhibits like the recent stupendous Paul Strand retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (I went twice in one week!). Sometimes I also go to an equally bad exhibit at a local gallery (seeing this type of thing encourages me to press forward with my own vision!).

Anyway, after I seriously got interested in making photographs as a teenager not many of my attempts were very good. But I kept on trying, kept going places with my camera. I am sure it helped that not having much money forced me into using only one camera with one lens. Yes I progressed beyond the Brownie, Instamatic and Argus, moving on to a Konica fixed lens rangefinder and eventually reaching the promised land … a new Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic with 50mm f1.8 lens! Yes, all those papers I delivered finally paid off!

Somehow I think that simplicity of the one camera/one lens philosophy can give you a better opportunity to “put yourself in the picture” as some have described it (I hope to talk about this more in another entry). I think this is a good strategy, at least until you reach a certain level of accomplishment. In any case, it took me about three years until I finally made a photograph that looked to me how I truly envisioned it to be in my mind’s eye.

Pay dirt!

So I had to make a lot of pictures…kiss a lot of frogs. I got better results the more time I put into it and the more images I made. By the way, the same was true of my darkroom skills (more on that at another time). I am not saying that it takes everyone as long as it took me. Maybe I am picky, who knows, but the point is that “practice, practice, practice” equals fun, fun, fun and results, results, results. So don’t sit around thinking about it, buying more gear or spending excessive time on the forums. Make images, some of which will be “keepers” and be meaningful to you!