I enjoy sharing my photography with other people, and the place I share the most is on my blog.  The thing that I enjoy about that is that most of the people who read my blog, or at least those who comment on my posts, read it because they enjoy reading what I have to say and enjoy looking at the photographs I’ve made.  I’ll occasionally get some constructive feedback about a process or technique I’ve used, but mostly it is just friends enjoying other friends’ photographs.  I like that.

I often have a hard time sharing my photography with other photographers, especially hobbyist photographers, because too often such discussions turn into what I call a “duck measuring contest.”  As soon as I show a photograph, someone has to pull out their iPhone and say, “Oh yeah, I got that.  See?” or “here’s my albino Lithuanian wildebeest from my trip to the Masai last fall.”  Whatever.  It stops becoming a discussion about photography and becomes all about their photography.  They don’t really care about my photography, they just care about showing me theirs.  It doesn’t work that way on our blogs, though.  And I appreciate that.

Kathy & I went to a wine dinner a few months ago at our favorite restaurant.  Wine dinners are an experience that we really enjoy, and involves a pairing of nice wines with foods prepared specially to match up with the wines.  Done well it is a culinary experience that is tough to beat.  At these dinners we are always seated at a table with 4-6 others, almost always couples.  The people are all very nice, but sometimes they know each other and Kathy & just sit there and listen, as they regale each other with tales of their most recent conquest, whether it is dinner at the French Laundry, their new boat or car, or their new 2,000 bottle wine room in their McMansion at the lake.

Eventually someone realizes that there are other people at the table (us) and decides to be polite and talk to us.  Sometimes they’ll ask us where we live, whether we’ve ever been to Napa or what our favorite wineries are.  And while it might appear that they are actually interested in what we do for a living or how old our kids are, it always seems to me to be an excuse to “pull out their iPhone” and talk about themselves.  I’m not completely sure, but I think that’s because people like to find out where you fall on their own personal hierarchy.  A lot of people have a need for that, and it brings them comfort to be able to rank and judge people based on their own scale of whatever it is that they value.

When I share my photographs on my blog, I never feel like someone is comparing my work to someone else’s, at least from the standpoint of whose work is better or who is a better photographer than someone else.  Because for many of us it’s about appreciating someone’s work for what it is, not trying to prove we are better than everyone else.

One of the things I find fascinating is the wide variety of subject matter and the range of equipment we use.  We have people shooting with the latest WhizBang Mark V, some using point & shoot cameras and others shooting with film.  And it’s all good.  Because what matters to us is not whether someone has the latest camera, but how they use the camera they have.

Whether a photograph was taken in someone’s back yard, Yosemite, Nova Scotia or Tuscany, what’s important is enjoying looking at photographs that show what someone sees and how they see it, not where they were when they took it or what camera they shot it with.  And we learn about that by sharing.  Sharing comments on someone else’s photographs and receiving comments on our own.

I recently built a new computer.  Well, to be accurate, my son Kevin built a new computer and allowed me to plug in some of the parts, and I mostly installed the operating system with him looking over my shoulder.  He hides his impatience with me pretty well, but he very politely allowed me to do it even though I was pretty slow and had to refer to the instructions too much. 🙂

Buying the parts was about as easy as buying a whole computer already assembled.  I got a list of all the stuff I needed from a website online, confirmed my choices with Kevin and with Earl, and a few days later it started raining Newegg boxes at our house!  The assembly process was fairly straightforward, too.  Although it helped a lot that Kevin knew where all the plugs and pieces went.  I would still be trying to figure it out if I was trying to do it on my own.

I know enough about computers to be just shy of dangerous.  But I know little enough that whenever I start to ask someone a question I can feel the “please don’t ask me a computer question” tension start to build.  As part of the learning process I spent a lot of time trying to figure stuff out for myself, and that involved looking at message boards.  And just like on photography boards, there was a lot of condescending “if you don’t know that you don’t have any business building a computer” talk, and that can be a little off-putting.  I never would have attempted the project if I didn’t have expert help, but now that I’ve seen it done, I feel like I would be a little more confident trying to make a change or even building another computer.  Although the idea is that I won’t have to do that for a long time.

One of the first things I did after I got the computer up and running was to install Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC.  I had not used Lightroom 5 on my old computer, because it was barely able to run Lightroom 4, and I was certain it would choke on Lightroom 5.  I did have Photoshop CS6 on my old computer, but the only thing I was using it for was adding the text to my monthly calendar and sharpening the output for the web.  The new versions of Lightroom and Photoshop aren’t a lot different than the previous ones, but it became apparent very quickly that I have some catching up to do.

Because I have taught classes and done tutoring in Lightroom, I consider myself a bit of an expert.  I have even toyed with the idea of taking the test to become an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in Lightroom.  But now I feel like I need to take a class myself, because after just a few short months of not keeping up, I’m already behind.

And that brings me to the point of this article.  There are so many things that we have to know and understand to be photographers that it is hard to keep up with it all.  We’ve always needed to be experts on the basics – composition, exposure and focus – fortunately those basics don’t change much, although the more we learn the more we find out we don’t know.  We need to have a high level of familiarity with the mechanics of our equipment, and that equipment has gotten more complex as our cameras have become capable of doing more things.  And then there is the output side – computers and printers.  Assuming that we buy a computer that is already built, there is still a matter of getting everything to do what we need it to do, such as installing the software, calibrating the display and hooking up the printer.  And if we decide that we want to do our own printing, that is a whole world in and of itself.

I love learning new things.  That’s why the project of building a computer appealed to me.  And there is something fun about buying all of the parts and assembling your own.  And the fact that I was able to buy and build a computer to do my photography makes it that much more rewarding.  But now the real fun begins.  I get to learn how to use it and make it do what I want it to do, to hopefully make the final result of my photography even better.  I’m glad I had some friends to help me along the way, and I’m sure I will be relying on them for more help down the road.  But I’ll try to figure it out myself before I ask!