Tim Grey’s Blog

I was recently reminded of the value of practice in improving any skill.

I don’t have (or don’t create) much opportunity to photograph sporting events. But while I was in Spain on a cycling trip that roughly followed the Vuelta a Espana cycling race, I had plenty of opportunity to photograph the cyclists before and during the stages of the race.

The time trial stage proved to be a particularly valuable experience in practice, practice, practice. The cyclists would start one at a time, separated by a two or three minute gap. That meant every two or three minutes another cyclist was riding by.

This gave me an opportunity to not only experiment with different positions, angles, and camera settings, but also gave me the opportunity to effectively photograph the exact same thing over, and over, and over again. I mean, when it comes down to it there isn’t much variety when stay in roughly the same position and watch over a hundred cyclists ride one after another. But I saw that as an opportunity to practice photographing a moving subject, which is something I don’t do particularly often.

The experience made me think about how valuable it would be to find similar opportunities. Whether it finding situations where you can photograph the same basic subject repeatedly without much variation to get really good at that one type of shot, or trying to find as many ways as possible to photograph a single subject in order to expand your creative vision, there’s value in “boring”. And often you’ll find boring isn’t actually boring at all.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Creativity, Photography. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.