“Why does one photographer walk by an opportunity that someone else turns into a magazine cover? How can you learn to see creatively? Your camera manual won’t answer these questions.”

This is a question I ask myself fairly often as I admire the work of friends and colleagues on their web sites and Flickr posts and see their results from the same meetup or photo walk. My biggest barrier is patience – more precisely, the lack of it. I start out slow, but before I know it I am back in my old habit of speeding though a shoot or location and miss many unexplored opportunities. I do better at most things when I have some sort of process to follow that keeps me from loosing focus. The problem there is that in coming up with a process my tendency towards the logical works against me. I follow to logical a pattern. I tend to eliminate items from the foreground and background until something catches my eye. Unfortunately, what I am often left with is the most obvious choice.

I’ve been reading a few books and doing some web searches and found an interesting and informative article by Scott Bourne at Call of the Wild Photo called Seven Ways To Improve Your Photographic Vision. In it he explains seven ways to step outside your comfort zone and try different approaches to common subjects. Then as you learn to see things in a new way, you begin to open up to new opportunities to stretch your creativity and grow in your craft. Something to think about the next time I’m out with my camera.