I’ve been missing my camera lately. Haven’t been able to take a lot of time to get out and shoot lately.
Last weekend, I went to the Arnold Sports Festival just as I do every year. Needless to say, there are plenty of opportunities to shoot interesting things there. Those photos will be up when I get the time to do all the editing. This isn’t the kind of thing I want to talk about in this post though. This one is about learning to recognize the less obvious opportunites.
Currently, we’ve got a decent amount of snow down in central Indiana. This is what I saw outside my back door when I woke up yesterday morning.
Just like every day, I go home on my lunch break to walk Loki. As I was walking around that lake, I found myself wishing I had more time so I could go take some photos. At that point, I realized that I had 10 minutes before I had to head back. That’s more than enough time to get some good time in. I put the dog inside, grabbed my camera, and headed right out my back door. Here are a couple of the snaps I got in that 10 minutes.
Among other things, I’ve been itching to get back to working more with my camera. For some reason, I’d been stuck in this idea that I needed a lot of time in a single session but, upon thinking about it, there’s no reason for that. It’s entirely possible to get something done in a very short period. Hell, one of my favorite kettlebell workouts only takes 12 minutes.
I then started thinking about how I can apply the same idea to other things I want to do. There’s no reason I can’t do some resistance band mobility work sitting at my desk at work between calls. Even standing up and doing some hip mobility work, stretching, and other such physical movement.
It’s time to start figuring out ways I can take micro-steps toward things I want to accomplish. As for the photography, maybe I’ll even start working with the idea of very fast sessions. I believe the first place I saw something like that was Jared Polin’s 5 minute portraits on his site FroKnowsPhoto.com. Take a subject and shoot for five minutes. It’ll get you really good at setting up and composing in a hurry.
What else would I be spending that time doing? Most likely, I’d be wasting time playing online or, if not at work, watching something on Netflix while wasting time playing online. Time to minimize that and work on anything that will help me get closer to what I want.
Five minutes at a time.
