Deliberate Practice

365project: Day 5

Day 5.

Today had some exciting prospects because were were able to finish at the gym almost two hours earlier than usual. This meant I finally had the opportunity to start experimenting with the beautiful lighting of the setting sun. Not quite sunset as it still sets too late in August, but at least not the harsh mid day sun.

The goal of this challenge, as stated previously , is to actually improve the skills used. These are not just going to improve by themselves through repetition but only through concentrated deliberate efforts to improve. Deliberate practice in other words. Something I came across in Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, and immensely excited to try to implement throughout this project. The other aspect of deliberate improvement is to utilise a mentor, luckily youtube is full of great ones. Nigel Danson was the one for me these past couple of days during lunch time. I think I find him particularly insightful now as my easiest sources for photography during the project was landscape type shots.

Still need to work on the blog mentoring aspect, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Back to today’s photo, I decided to head to Vliegenbos, inspired by the woodland work of my newly appointed mentor and here is what I came up with.

As Im pressed for time this post wont contain those photos that I feel did not work at all. Instead below are the ones that I do quite like, even if they are still not 10/10 photos by my judgement.

The first aspect of the location was how the sun came through the low hanging branches and shrubs to cast some interesting light on some leaves while leaving others in the dark. I wanted to use that somehow when I noticed this one specific dying leave sort of framed with green ones. This felt like a nice hint at the coming autumn.

Then just before I left I looked around to try and spot a tree or set of trees that might be seen as a good subject for a photo. The shot below is far from great, but im proud of it because it forced me to look for a type if photo I would have never taken before. The “non-obvious” item to photograph. I find this particularly interesting when looking at any great woodland photographer, how they seemly manage to get a good photo by just capturing a bunch of trees. Obviously referring to Nigel here.

Bring on day 6!