Practice, Practice, Practice

If there is one activity I love more than photography, it is playing softball. I joined a 50 and over coed league and we practice Monday mornings at a nearby park. The athleticism and camaraderie are a wonderful start to the week.

As always, the activity begins around 9 a.m. with cars pulling into the parking lot, the bases being put out, and teammates stretching and warming up. On this day, like many others, the morning light stretched across the field and illuminated the peaks of the Angeles National Forest that overlooks the park. Some of us stretched out within shafts of sunlight for a few extra degrees of warmth.

I am never without my camera, so it accompanies my mitt, bat, and cleats to practice. Though the priority is playing softball, I always look for opportunities to make a photograph. I do so because on some days it may be the only time I will have to make pictures. There are just days when I am going to be tied to the desk chair trying to make things happen and meet yet another deadline.

My x100s possesses only a fixed 23mm lens, which performs as the equivalent of a 35mm focal length. So I am not shooting from a distance with a telephoto lens to capture action. The images I create are more intimate and capture the small details of sports and friendship. These are not images of anonymous strangers on the street. I look for moments of personal interaction and telling details. I want images that my friends will recognize as part of our time together, but seen through my eyes.

On this day, I was in the queue to practice my batting when I saw another player’s dog at the fence. I noticed the light illuminating him from behind as well as a plastic bucket filled with softballs. I liked how the sunlight produced a circle of edge-lighting around the center of the fence that the dog was looking through.

I made several frames of the dog, fence, and balls, but I knew the photograph needed a little something more. That little something arrived when a hand reached down and grasped a ball. I had everything I needed.

It was a quiet and simple moment, but this is an image that helps to tell part of the story that we share every week.

Finding the Time

Though I have made my living as a photographer and a writer for decades, that has not meant that I am always out in the world photographing. As anyone who is self-employed knows, much of my time is spent drumming up business, networking, organizing paperwork, and handling whatever personal business arises during the day. There is no shortage of things to do, and having the time to photograph continuously for a couple of hours is more the exception than the rule. Such times have to be planned and will hopefully not conflict with those unexpected and almost inevitable occurrences of life that eat away the hours and minutes of the day.

This is the reason I always have my camera with me. It keeps me from falling back on the excuse that I do not have time or the equipment available to practice making photographs. Whether I have minutes or hours, I am always on the hunt for an opportunity to practice seeing and making photographs. Even if I only find one scene to photograph in a day, I completely dedicate myself to those moments, because I know it is not how much time I have to enjoy photography that day, but how well I utilize the time I do have.

One of the habits I practice is arriving early for appointments. Not only is it a smart thing to do with Los Angeles’s pernicious traffic jams, but it also gives me time to wander and look for photographs. I usually do not have to go far to find a scene to photograph. Using the principles of the visual draws, I often discover a scene that has potential.

This proved to be true when I came upon a scene in an alleyway just half a block from where my morning appointment was scheduled to take place (next page). I walked past it and saw the shadow of the street sign against the white wall. The graphic qualities of the sign and diagonal metal pole against the repeating pattern of white brick drew me in. I composed the photograph, making small refinements with each frame until I was satisfied.

Those 15 minutes provided me with a wonderful image to start the day and satisfied that daily craving to be creative. Even if that were the only photograph I made that day, I still felt a sense of accomplishment.

I used to beat myself up for not getting out to shoot for days and even weeks, but I rarely experience that now. With my camera at the ready, I always find time during the day to practice seeing and making photographs. It is not essential that the images be exceptional or great. What is important is that I am practicing seeing and creating opportunities for myself to grow and develop as a photographer.

Exhaust All the Possibilities

When you make time to photograph, you have to make the most of it, and to do that, you have to leverage the scene and the moment for as much as you can. It is often not enough to make a couple of photographs and move on to the next opportunity. If you measure your time practicing photography only by the number of images you create, you are poorly served. If, instead, you examine how carefully you explored a scene visually, you are ahead of the game.

If you come upon a moment, stop, raise the camera, and make only one or two photographs, you are not seeing. You are snapping pictures. You are not examining how all the disparate elements in front of you relate or do not relate to each other within the context of the photographic frame. This is this kind of picture-taking that leads to so much disappointment because the photographer is relying on the camera itself to work some form of magic. This results in images that are more appreciated for the sharpness of the lens or the low noise of the camera’s sensor than for the content of the photograph.

Exhausting all the possibilities means moving beyond that first photograph. It means considering more than just the subject, but also the foreground and background, as well as those elements located at the edges of the frame. It means evaluating the scene using the principles of the visual draws—light and shadow, line and shape, color, and gesture—and considering how they may strengthen and weaken the image. It means seeing the potential of a scene and recognizing that it needs a little something else in order to elevate the photograph to something special.

When I was photographing these two young boys, dressed for a wedding at a downtown church, I wanted to use the graphic shadows in the composition. The sun created a triangle of light in the center of the frame where I wanted the two kids to be. I wanted to leverage the shadows of the boys themselves as they moved through the scene.

I positioned myself on the overlook and worked on refining my overall frame, always keeping an eye on where the boys moved through the scene. They ran back and forth in and out of the shadows. I made several frames of them, many of which did not work because of their relative positions. I wanted each boy and his respective shadow to be cleanly defined against the ground. With each unsuccessful frame I made, I also practiced patience, believing that I would be rewarded for it.

The moment happened when the younger boy dashed across the courtyard as his brother stepped out of the shadows. I saw the clear definition that I had been hoping for and I pressed the shutter-release button at the moment the younger boy’s feet left the ground.

I was able to capture this photograph and so many other scenes like it not only because I parsed the scene using the visual draws, but also because I had the patience to let the moment play out. Sometimes the best photographs happen not because the photographer has catlike reflexes, but because they have the foresight and patience to allow the world to culminate in a moment that can only be captured in a photograph.

In the age of digital cameras, you can make as many photographs as you want. You are no longer restrained by the cost of processing film and creating prints. However, you cannot absently take photographs hoping to get a “good one.” It is the choice to actively see and pick your moment that increases the likelihood of making a good photograph.

Making different choices, including changing your focal length or perspective, orienting your camera vertically or horizontally, moving closer to or further away from your subject, under- or overexposing the photograph, or adjusting any other variable, provides you with the opportunity to see, revaluate, and make a conscious choice as to how you want to make a photograph. It is this skill that makes you a photographer, and as you will find in the next chapter, it is the creation of these variations of a subject, scene, or moment that helps you to identify the images that work better than others.

Embrace the Failures

One of the reasons it is so important to practice photography on a daily basis is that it lessens the burden of always having to knock it out of the park. When I was not photographing on a regular basis, I created an unrealistic expectation for myself that the images I created on a given day had to be great. I had to make exceptional photographs in order for the time to feel justified. If the images were lackluster, I grew frustrated and questioned my abilities and talents.

When I did that I was not being fair to myself. The creative process is not about perfectionism, but rather the acceptance and even the embracing of failure. This is especially the case with photography, where the great majority of images that a photographer makes fall short of the mark. Failure is not an absolute. Failure is merely feedback.

When a photograph does not succeed, it is a learning opportunity, a chance to examine and reassess what we are doing with the camera and how we are seeing a subject and a scene. Each image that does not completely work—whether because of a technical issue, the composition, lighting, or timing—provides the photographer with valuable information. Each of those images, compounded several times over time, offers a lesson that should inevitably inform the next photo opportunity.

The image of the white wall earlier in this chapter is a perfect example of this idea at play. Because the scene was predominately white, the camera’s metering system would have metered that as 18% gray by default, and the resulting image would have been underexposed. I had photographed similar scenes in the past that were dominated by white and had seen the resulting underexposure. I knew from experience that I needed to apply some exposure compensation so that the white wall would be rendered as white in the photograph. With this particular camera, I knew that a +1 compensation would be more than adequate. I did not need to correct for it after the fact in Lightroom.

Each error, mistake, or missed opportunity has proven more valuable to me than my successes. As pleased as I am with a great photograph, it is the many times that I have fallen short that have helped to shape me as a photographer. And this has only been possible by ensuring that I make time for my photography on a consistent and regular basis, even if it is as little as 15 minutes a day.

Combining Two Loves

Six months into playing in the softball league, I began to bring my camera to practice. At first I was tentative about making photographs, but people soon became accustomed to the camera’s presence.

I noticed during our early morning practices and games that sometimes the light was beautiful. On clear days, the sun provided strong directional light and long shadows. It was something I wanted to take advantage of because I knew that the only other time I might have an opportunity to shoot would be in the middle of the day when the light was less ideal. The field featured the precise chalk lines of the game and I could see that the location offered a variety of graphic elements that I could use for compositions.

As I began to squeeze in a few photographs each practice or game day, I found myself looking for details and moments that captured the experience of being out in the field twice a week. Though I still wanted to create a good photograph that leveraged as many of the visual draws as possible, I was much more interested in creating images that told a facet of a story.

On such days, I might make no more than 15 images, but with each one I was thinking as thoughtfully as I could about composition and story. Though I limited the time I dedicated to photography during our practices and games, I was nevertheless applying a careful method of seeing. I found that the regular practice, especially with the same subject matter each week, provided me with more than I could have imagined when I first began bringing my camera.

Whether the images were of people at bat, tossing a ball, donning a glove, writing on the roster board, embracing, laughing, or yelling, they each exhibited an informed way of seeing that I had practiced and honed over years. It was not that I was specifically thinking of each of the visual draws every time I made a photograph, but later I could see how my awareness of them informed each photograph.

The sequence of images on the following pages illustrates a frequent moment in the dugout when my teammates were anxiously observing the action at home plate. It is a scene that I have witnessed often while sitting on the bench waiting for my turn at bat. I saw one of my teammates moving to take his position on deck while another stood at the opening of the dugout. Our manager was doing something at the roster and another person sat immediately to my right.

I saw the possibility for an interesting layered composition. I also observed that because we were in the shade, I risked underexposure due to the brightness of the background. I increased my exposure compensation by one stop and then brought the camera to my eye.

As the scene played out, I composed the photograph, including all four people in the frame. I only had time to create four photographs, each distinctly different from the next. The most successful of the four images is the one in which the manager is bending over to sit down. The first and second photograph do not work for me because the face of the person sitting next to me takes up too much of the frame. In the fourth, the manager is seated and is no longer an element in the frame. The third is the best image of the sequence.

This is not a perfect image. Compositionally, I should have shifted the camera down slightly to create greater separation between the glove in the fence and the player standing behind it. And in an ideal world, I would have loved to have a clear emotional reaction to what was happening on the field. But even with those qualifiers, I consider this a successful image because it tells an important aspect of the story. It also demonstrates my increasing awareness of scenes that can be transformed into strong and effective layered compositions. Though I only had four frames to play with, I recognized the natural intuitiveness that I was developing.

I imagine that this is much like when a seasoned guitarist plays a song. They do not have to think about exactly where to place their fingers to create a chord, their hands just automatically know what to do as if they had a mind of their own. That is the kind of intuitiveness that I have found myself practicing, and it only comes as a result of years of photographing every day.

These images are likely the beginning of what will be a long-term project. I derive a special kind of joy combining my two loves at least twice a week.