I’ve discovered that photography is all about focus. Some genius I am, right? No, I’m not talking about the focus in-camera, I’m talking about the focus of the photographer!

If you want to do something well and get the best possible results, you have to give that a 100% of your attention. You need to focus completely. Photography is by no means an exception to this, I noticed. If I’m not focused on photography, my pictures immediately degrade to mediocre snapshots. Then I’m just another tourist, with an expensive camera - which betters the chance of at least my pictures being ‘in focus’.

This effect was again eminent during my last winter sports holiday, a few weeks back. With my brand-new Nikon D300 I left with the ambition to take some great action shots. And, as an enthusiastic snowboarder, I was also looking forward to some fun rides down the mountain. After all, one week of snow fun is all I have per year, so need to make the best of it.

Here the trouble starts… I want both winter sports fun and great pictures! And that doesn’t work. When I’m carrying my gear, I can’t go a 100% on my snowboard and if I don’t really plan my pictures, I end up taking action shots in the shadow after a beautiful sunny day: see pictures here to the right (click to enlarge). The action-shot is, well, ‘nice’. But it’s definitely not ‘great’, like I wanted.

And I’m glad it works this way! Huh? Yeah, really! If great photo’s would be available at will, you know, when it just ‘happens to suit me’ to take a few shots, it just wouldn’t be challenging. Now that would be a disappointment…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.