Learning the Ropes

When I first began my job as the sports editor at the Molalla Pioneer I was more concerned with writing than taking photographs. I just felt less comfortable with the clicking of a shutter than the clacking of a keyboard.

I have been writing ever since I can remember.

Little stories about marooned boys finding treasure on an island full of magic and pirates—normal preteen stuff I guess.

So when I covered my first game the piece of equipment with flashing bulbs and whirring focus sounds scared the crap out of me.

It was a Colton boys basketball game and my main concern was just getting a photo that would pass in the printed page.

Something that would not be blurry, have a face in it and not have too many limbs cut off and floating outside of the pane of the picture—aside from the poor composition it would cause the aspect of floating phantom limbs terrified me.

However, as time passed and I messed up with crappy lighting and blurry action I became more comfortable with the workings of photography. The intricacies of choosing the correct speed, ISO and aperture settings began to settle in on my brain I became better. Sure I failed, but I started to make some progress.

Suddenly I was going into events with shots already framed in my head, planes of focus that I wanted to nail down—moments in the action that would best tell a story.
I am not saying that I am some sort of expert photographer now. There is plenty more for me to learn. But it has struck me how many things in life are the same as my process of learning how to take pictures.

At first you just want to get through it. Just hope that you don’t screw anything up too badly.

However that passes, and if you become comfortable with the thing that were so new before, you are no longer strictly concerned with how to survive, and more concerned with how you can go about the best way to thrive.

To be stuck in the comfortable, the routine, is like pulling out a camera and fearing the clicking sound it makes just hoping that you get something right so you can move onto the clacking of the keyboard.

If you can break out though, if you can experiment and pick yourself up from a fall then you might be able to be concerned with something else, you might be able to put your stamp on something.

The love you give comes back in the end.