Learning persistence and patience

Photography really helps you understand a lot about yourself. I like to think I am very persistent person, but I am positive that I am not very patient.  That shows I think in a lot of the raw photos that I take.  I tend to take hundreds of pictures in a very short period of time and never stop for breaks when I am shooting something – that is my persistence showing.  But also, many of those photo’s are poorly composed and not crystal clear focus – that is my lack of patience showing.  Luckily in this digital age my lack of patience is forgiven as I just delete any of the photos that are not good – and there are many.  I would say about 50% of my photos are discarded right off the bat, and another 25% deleted after a second go through.  I focus on fine tuning the rest of those photos with PhotoShop and some remarkable software from NIK Software (a company based here in San Diego).

I took the shot below in Vinh Long Vietnam.  For about 5 days straight I was trying to capture a good shot outside of Tu’s home there.  Each day I ended up with an array of non-inspiring shots that didn’t really convey anything about the neighborhood.  On the last day, I finally captured a photo I liked.  Three girls on bikes were sharing a bike ride home during an outright monsoon.  I mean it was pouring rain like you have never seen.  The girls were laughing.  What you do not see before this photo is what setup that shot.  The girls were cycling by and they noticed a crazy white guy standing in the middle of the rain taking pictures. First off they probably rarely so white people in this town, and secondly they probably never saw anybody taking photos in the pouring rain.  You would think based on this photo that they were having a laugh at the cow, but it was in fact me.  This photo is a good example of you can get a good photo but it will oftentimes take a lot of patience and persistence.  In this case it took me about 4 days.