I like photographing birds. I take our dog for a walk, drink a coffee, then I often go to the yard to capture those feathered creaturess. It’s a ritual to collect my thoughts and prepare for the day.
There might be a few lessons there which are applicable for another parts of life (and work):
Know what you have control over
You have a camera in your hand. You control the focal length, the iso, the shutter speed and the composition . Do you control the distance? You can try to get closer, but if you overreach they will fly away. You can file that under “missed opportunities “ . Eventually what you have to realize is birds are notoriously fidgety little bastards and you have no control over them. You have to let that urge go…
Limits of technology
There is a common saying amongst photographers: “Your gear doesn’t matter”. What people usually rather mean is that you can take good photos with any camera and lens.
That is absolutely not true for bird photography. A telephoto lens is mandatory, resolution continosly increasing and in recent years the autofocus software improved a lot. It can now automatically focus on the eyes of animals. These are tools that help reaching your goal. You can buy sharper and faster lenses and better camera bodies as long as your wallet allows it.
As it often happens in life, at a certain point you will see diminishing returns for your dollars.
Crap in crap out
As a photographer you are advised to capture images in raw format. The reason being that you can recover more data in post-processing. Yet if your image is blurry, severely under or overexposed, the image is beyond repair: You can polish an okay solution and improve on it, but if you start with crap you are screwed. Sadly the inverse is not true, you can move a single slider a bit too much on a perfect image and you ruin it.
