Secret Waterfall

To say this shot was a lesson in both humility and patience would be an understatement. First the humility…I’ll be frank: I messed this one up in the field by trying to be overly technical and not understanding exactly what I was doing. The joys of being self-taught is that sometimes you misunderstand some concepts and mistakes become hard and fast learning experiences. I tried to do a series of images for focus stacking and bracketing but completely messed up my depth of field and aperture with rookie mistakes. I thought the entire shoot was wasted, which sucks because this is an amazing location and I was unsure of the next time I’d get back there.

Now for the patience part…after watching some processing tutorials from Alister Benn I went looking for a particular shot from this trip to practice on. While in the folder I found these shots and thankfully found one I had shot at f9 where everything was sharp from front to back. I started to work on editing it and am beyond happy with the result. Patience and timing paid off because I wouldn’t have been able to process this this well had I done so at the time I took it. The past year has really done wonders for my processing.

So it all worked out in the end after all. The point being, don’t get too ahead of yourself. Two years ago I was three years in, had a strong following and I felt I was doing pretty good. But I’ve probably learned more about all aspects of the craft in the last year than I did in the first four years. And I still have so far to go. Knowing that you know nothing is a great way to grow and push ourselves creatively and technically and not let our ego get in the way of that growth. It’s something I learned in my years of teaching martial arts and it applies just as well in photography.