PICZD

There’s nothing wrong with not being any good at photography. Everybody started out bad and none of us does all aspects of it well. But it’s a crying shame to want to be good at it, to spend time and money trying to be good at it, and not getting any better.

This isn’t like teaching a child to read. Positive reinforcement is your enemy. Your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers… hate you.  Instead of taking ten seconds to say. “This doesn’t work. You need to do better”. They readily push that “like” button, because it’s easy and they hope to get the same from you, but also because they’re cowards.

Read the whole thing at Mostly True. Worth reading. It takes courage to be honest with yourself and others. It takes even more courage to know you suck, and to make the hard decisions that follow.

I watched a photography tutorial once, I don’t remember what it was, that ended with a particularly satisfying joke. It went something like this: Master all of this, and you’ll earn the ultimate compliment from people who see your work: “Wow, you must have a really nice camera!”

People think, for some reason, that this is a response that makes sense. If you’ve done this yourself, I have no hard feelings about it… but maybe, the next time you enjoy a piece of writing, think about whether it’s the writer or the computer that made it good. Was it the clarity of the printed word that brought you enjoyment? Or was it the words themselves?