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41.3 - Practice

#3: Practice

Practice, as in Doing

You learn to see by practicing.

The more you look around at things, the more you see.

The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed, and what can't be photographed.

The more you photograph, the more your way-of-working will become evident, so you can refine it more.

Practice, as in Habit, Routine, Discipline

Before I have breakfast, I go for a walk and take pictures.

That's my practice/habit/routine/discipline.

A regular pattern of photography behavior can fire your photography.

But, don't go overboard:

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his "Autobiography," he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M., with his watch in front of him.

He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next.1

1 Acocella, J. (2004, June 14 & 21). Blocked : Why do writers stop writing? New Yorker, 110-129.