Practice Practice!

Recently, I decided to do some personal work. I get asked all the time, "What do you shoot for your own personal work? Do you do landscapes? Do you shoot when you travel? Do you create fine art stuff?" When I travel, I usually don't take pictures; I like to get away from work and chill. I've always looked at my paid work as personal work; I feel like I get to do personal work for my paying clients because they trust me, and I get to do what I want. I'm so passionate about my photography that it's pretty exhausting at times. I'm continually studying photography and thinking about it every day. My obsession makes it difficult for me to want to do personal work outside of paying work. It feels overwhelming to take on more work when I'm always so consumed.

Recently, I was studying to get a professional accreditation and become a Certified Professional Photographer, or CPP through PPA, Professional Photographers of America. The certification is mostly technical skills and posing and lighting as PPA is geared towards portrait and wedding photographers. I studied photography at Chaffey College, got an Associates' degree decades ago, and I followed that up with assisting professional celebrity and advertising photographers in Los Angeles. My technical skills are substantial thanks to years of work in the industry. Mostly I was just refreshing old content, but it was still kind of cool. I really enjoyed studying lighting and posing from old-school portrait masters. And the one thing that kept coming up was that you should always practice. I heard the same bit of advice from several educators. Their parting words would always be to "keep practicing."

So anyway, I finally decided, okay, I got to go out and try something new. I'm going to go out and do some new practice shots. And so I took these pictures in downtown Claremont a couple of weeks ago when it was raining at night. I wanted to try something totally different and outside of my comfort zone. The entire experience was eye-opening. I didn't really know where to start since I honestly haven't practiced, just to practice in years. So I started with...I think I want to test out this brand new Fuji lens I just got. I want to play with some longer exposures, and why not go shoot in the rain? I don't even know if I've shot in the rain in a long, long time. The cool thing is the Fuji XT2 and the new lens; the Fuji 16-55mm f2.8 are waterproof.

Honestly, I didn't take it very seriously. My ego thought, this will be easy, I can do it all, I'm great! Lol, I started driving over to downtown Claremont with my gear, and I started getting nervous. I start realizing, "Oh man, what if I suck at this? What if I can't create cool images?" Because in my studio, I have my jam, I got my staff, and I got my whole system, and I do it all the time; it's no big deal. But all of a sudden, I've got to do something new. It's funny when you're good at something that we assume we must be equally good at other genres of that skill. I've made that mistake in cycling many times. I win a cyclocross race and enter a road race a few weeks later, expecting to crush it, nope. Lol

So, I actually thought that it was kind of cool I had some nerves over it. Something I've always loved is a challenge. I like that photography and racing bikes are challenging and require tons of work to excel. Hard work has always been my secret weapon. My superhero power is to outwork my competition.

Once I confronted the fear, I knew all that was needed was to get to work, so on I go. I drove around downtown Claremont Village a little bit, looking for something inspiring or exciting. It was raining decently, which made the streets glow with reflections from street lights and neon signage. I began photographing the intersection where Pizza N Such is on Yale ave. I started discovering new angles and played with longer exposures to see how that affected the reflections. And in the end, I was super stoked about what I created. I created some new stuff I hadn't done before, and it even challenged my technical skills.

I never realized how challenging landscape photography in weather is. My fingers were frozen by the time I was done; actually, that's when I gave up and said, "I've had enough." Composing landscapes is also much harder than I thought, probably because I'm only used to portraits. I have a newfound respect for other disciplines. And just because you're really good at one or two fields doesn't mean the other ones are super easy. I think every single niche in photography is just like a different sport. You might be able to step into it and do okay, but it definitely takes some work to really excel at it. So it was really cool to do this practice. Now I see why the masters keep repeating to people of all ages, "You should always practice. You should always practice."

Beyond the physical and emotional challenges, I love the images, the reflections on the ground from Pizza N Such, and these starbursts from the hanging lights outside Viva Madrid. It was really cool to also have to just focus solely on composition. It's totally different than a portrait, where the emotion is king. With nightscapes, you got to get it perfect, as much as you can. So I think I learned a lot just messing around with composition and these images. How low the angle was, how high. How long did I run the exposure? Did I let cars come through the shots, stuff like that? So it was kind of fun to play around. And the images are super cool.

The most important thing I learned, which I've always known, is that you've got to practice. I study photography every day. I read it and stuff like that, but to go out and actually shoot new projects that I'm uncomfortable with, that challenge me, that's something I haven't done in a while. And I definitely look forward to doing more of that, so it was good.

I'd love to hear what you think about my images or my challenges as an artist. Please comment; I'd really appreciate the feedback or chance to connect.