Avoiding romantic thoughts.

If there is one thing I learned from my friend Maciek "Upartus" is that you cannot be romantic about taking photos. Your photos can be romantic but you cannot be romantic in your process. Before I met my friend I used to wait until a specific time of day to shoot, I always wanted clouds and if it wasn't the perfect combination I didn't like to shoot as much. I'm sure this lead me to missing a lot of photos it also didn't benefit my skill at all. Learning how to find beautiful light in all different settings and types of sunlight is essential. As a photographer everything starts with your knowledge of light, once you know light in a general sense only then can you start to learn more about other things. I tried to learn light from a text book but it never made sense to me the analogies and drawings all felt like a foreign language only by shooting a real lot did I start to understand light. Thats where the romance needs to end, to be a master at anything I believe in the 10,000 hour rule that it takes that long to master any subject. You cannot fake the 10,000 hours and I don't care how naturally talented someone is if you don't put in your hours you wont make it. No text book can ever be a supplement for real practice.