The key to great photography is boring

Most good things in life just take time

In a fast-paced world, shortcuts and workarounds sell. The promise of “fast mastery” is a very tempting one.

The hard truth is that most good things in life just take time. This is a boring idea, though, because no one’s got time for that these days.

It feels like it’s every week that a “game changer” thing comes around in the photography world. Whether it’s a new camera, lens, preset, AI model, editing software, film stock / developer, it’s always the thing that will finally take your photography to your next level.

But there’s no way around the thousands of hours we have to put into this art. It’s hard work and requires a lot of dedication, but it’s essential if we want to become great photographers. Surely, a new tool can help, but most of the time we are just wasting our time worrying about things that won’t actually help us make better photographs.

It’s a very simple concept, but not an easy one to embrace.