2nd Diary Entry


Photography is a lot like poker...


I had a baptism of fire when it came to learning poker - I went to Las Vegas for 3 weeks! To be fair, I had read a book on Texas Hold'Em by Phil Gordon. Anyway, I entered my first tournament after about a week of playing cash poker. At one point, I was literally down to a chip and a chair (a well known poker phrase meaning you're hanging on by A finger nail - not more than one, just one!) Well, I won the tournament! No-one was more amazed than me and I sauntered off back to the cash tables full of confidence... and promptly lost my shirt (ok, not physically, that probably would have caused the other players to throw my money back at me!) The incident reminded me of a phrase in Phil's book - poker takes 5 minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.

This is where the similarity to photography comes in. With a couple of days of pouring over my instruction manual, looking up a few words and phrases on t'interweb and asking a couple of photographic friends some questions, I knew how the camera worked. I knew what construction of a photograph meant and I understood the rule of thirds. So I took some shots - awful! Flat, boring, normal! Ok, so just knowing the mechanics isn't enough - there's some dark magic involved, obviously!

So it was back to the faithful computer. I found an online course with real tutors, coursework and assignments and signed up. Day one taught me that I actually knew nothing, so I laid down my little bit of self-taught trivia, my preconceptions and delusions of ability and really started to learn. I soon confirmed that this was not going to be a quick lesson....


Back to School I go