In the last week I’ve realized something… making frame worth sharing (or even something interesting) everyday is hard work, much harder than I thought.  I do have frames from everyday this past week but most of them are, what’s the word? Oh ya, “Crap” as in a waste of pixels.  Sure I learned something in the process and perhaps that alone made the weeks’ photos worthwhile, but the whole process has been very discouraging. Looking for a bit of encouragement I emailed a better shooter and asked for his advice, his response was brief: “Did you read [Joe] McNally’s post on Sept 10?”. So off to McNally’s site I went and read the Sept 10 post, and it was like he was speaking directly to me (you can read it here) and I’ll save you the trouble of figuring out what part spoke to me:

…Cause this is hard to do, right? Day after day, you come back without a great or even good frame. I’m reminded of the conversation betweeen Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in League of Their Own.

Jimmy Dugam: “Baseball is what gets inside you, it’s what lights you up. You can’t deny that.”
Dottie: “It just got too hard.”
Jimmy: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

There’s a lot of analogies between photography and baseball. Ray Fitzgerald of the Boston Globe wrote, “A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.”

Sounds like a photo shoot to me.

So I’m picking up my camera and getting back to work, not because it’s easy (well sometimes it is) but because it’s hard and like Jimmy said “it’s the hard that makes it great”.

Tags: Conversation
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