How long have you been Practicing

[Patrick]

Just curious in a general way how long have you been doing photography , This coming April 18th 2026 i will have been practicing it for 9 years and it has flown past in the blink of an eye at least that is how it feels now , First 3 years felt long i spent most of that time fumbling about with no rhythm to anything i was doing and then i felt things settled down by doing 5 years mostly concentrating on street photography which taught me alot very quickly about myself , I love candid moments the most and my fav focal length is 50mm even though i don’t use it a lot ( maybe this is why i love it ) i shoot everyday with a 35mm and only now and again i use a zoom of some type or a fixed 105mm ( when i feel lazy lol )

The one thing i cannot shake with street photography and that is guilt , sometimes i can get an image that is candid and only after i got the frame i wanted the person notices me and sometimes the look on their face a look of worry on their faces , who is he , what’s he want , did he just take my photo ecct , they never say anything and we both go our own way but i then have an awful feeling for hours after , did i just ruin someone’s day for the sake of a photo , i don’t like that feeling at all.

Now i am currently doing a self portrait series which is almost finished and i will start another project when this is finished but with another topic , i personally found doing a project has been more rewarding than i ever could have imagined in all kinds of ways and some of those benefits are not even to do with taking photos but are the result of commited practice routine , i find i finish more things now when i start something than i ever did before doing a long term project and that helps one’s own mood for starters.

Would be good to hear a few of your journeys , feel free to post below 🙂  Ask questions , start a discussion , anything , get involved ?

[davidc]

10 years for me. inherited a camera (D90) from my brother in law and that got me going. Had a film camera, a Praktica in the 70s, but it didn’t last long. I also don’t like the feeling of taking photos of people in the street, I still do, but reckon I miss a lot of good images because of that. Also I think we forget how costly photography is. Not just the main gear, but all the little stuff. Anyway, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend photography to anyone.

[Patrick]

Awesome mate , thank you for sharing and you are 100 percent right to recommend photography to anyone , like so many things in life david you never know until you try  , it is or can be a costly craft but i think what it gives you get back is priceless.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Bit of a difficult question for me because I grew up in a photography family. My mother was a pretty decent photographer back in the day and even had a few photos published in magazines when she was taking it seriously. We had a purpose-built dark room in our house. And I took photography as a subject in school as soon as it was available. Any time we went for a walk as a family it wasn’t really a walk. It was an excuse to go looking for good photos. But with all of that said I probably dug down a lot deeper when I was in Japan in about 2003 and had the opportunity to follow around a professional Ghetty photographer for a while. It was an incredibly difficult work and I was well out of my depth. But it forced me to take photography a lot more seriously because I didn’t wanna look like an absolute fool in front of very important people in the country who my friend was photographing. I shot as a hobby for a few years after that, and then I started Light Stalking in 2009 where I really dug down into landscape photography especially, but all of the other stuff as well. So I guess I would say 22 years of taking it very seriously, and maybe another 15-20 before that as a fun hobby… Fuck, I am old.

[Patrick]

That is some good time at it mate , the japan experience that is another level altogether 🙂

Thank you Rob much appreciate you dropping a few words and knowing a bit more , them years soon creep up Lol.

[LightandShadow]

I took up photography in a more or less serious way in 2003. On April 1 of that year, I had a bicycling accident that resulted in a broken collar bone and a broken femur (large leg bone). It was my 2nd serious accident in 3 years. This coincided with our planned trip to visit our daughter and son-in-law in England. In anticipation, I had bought a Minolta 35mm camera so that I would have better pictures than my Olympus point and shoot produced 3 years earlier when we were there for the wedding. DOH! It ain’t the camera that makes the picture?

In search of a new hobby, I took on photography. It also helped that my in laws lived at the beach and I fell in love with sunrise, to a great deal because I had a camera in hand. Digital proved a godsend to improvement. I have never been disciplined enough to take note of settings so I could understand what works.

I don’t think of what I do as a journey. The notion of a destination to be reached with satisfaction for arrival would, I think, undermine the engagement in the moment, both the immediacy and anticipation of a series of creative acts, an escape from living a sleepwalking life.

My own engagement is also fueled by talking about and hearing others talk about this activity. I do a lot of Facebook posting for friends’ enjoyment, but miss the days of informed interaction like this site provides. “Say it out loud” or at least think the words reinforces the craft but also the emotions that I otherwise might/would suppress.

And that’s why my posts tend to be so very long.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

So it only took a broken femur to get you into photography? Pretty brutal entrance there mate. But I totally agree about the informed conversation – when you have a group of people who just “get it” when you are talking about something, it makes those conversations a lot more enjoyable.

[Patrick]

Thank you very much Steve , i always like to know a little bit of what others are up to with their photography , i agree about digital being a good base to work and improve from simply because you are more or less free to shoot as much as you like and it is that very thing that helps us improve By shooting lots and lots , at least this is how i go about my own attempt to improve.

Sorry you had a couple of cycle accidents as well i have had number of them myself but nothing broken or serious , i am just the same i never take or took notes to many variables that depend on mother nature so in essence i wing it to point.

[Author]

Posts