Putting it all together now
This may seem like a lot, and quite frankly it is. Here is the good news, you can't do it all at once. So you don't even have to try. Pick parts to work on, sprint and take breaks.
This is about building patterns in your brain. Your brain learns what is important with reinforcement, and part of that reinforcement is taking breaks and coming back to things.
This shows your brain that it is important.
I can't stress enough how small things every day add up. When you get a bit tired of something, still doing something small every day to sustain you through your uninspired times still helps.
Even five minutes a day builds up over a month and a year. Say language learning. 3 new flashcards a day is a thousand words at the end of the year and is doable in 5–10 minutes.
Your motivation is going to come and go. That is natural, but finding ways to stick with it and change things up will keep you going.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. - Stephen King
Let's go through a high-level plan with something like photography. This is something I have become obsessed with for a bit now, and I have decided that I want to master it.
What does that look like?
Photography Plan
Goal
Start with my goal.
This will change as I go, but my high-level goal is to be able to capture the things I find interesting in the world. To use photography as a forcing function to really observe, not just see the world.
That is really broad, but it is a starting point.
Then mastery currently is figuring out how to capture those things and have them match up to my taste of what is good. Taste develops, but often it starts from something you already have. I know what I like in other photographs, but like Ira Glass talked about, I am in the gap between my skill and taste. Then I would like that to coalesce into a personal style. There is a set of well-earned micro-decisions that show in my photography.
I want to be consistent and not just wait for being in a wonderful place to be able to create a great photo.
So I have a rough goal and starting point.
What next?
Taste
On taste and the gap, I need to make what I like more concrete. For me, this is finding photographers and photos that I really like. Reading books, looking at many different photos. Building mood boards on what I like. This is not just an exercise to find out what I like and try to find those threads, but also a way of judging my own photos. Set a bar to compare against.
Style
You do not find your style, it finds you - Teo Crawford
In that exploration of what I like, try to build a map of all the styles. This could also be on what is missing.
What does the lay of land look like, street, landscape, portrait, abstract, etc?
Try to copy and emulate other photos, not to reproduce the work but to try and understand what they are attempting to achieve.
Learn to articulate what I do and do not like about a photo.
I need to find the goal of my photography, what I am I attempting to capture, then use that to help make those decisions. And finding some sort of consistency with it and to be able to work with intention.
What does style mean or what would mine be, I have no idea yet, but I can start to see things come into focus (see what I did there). It is consistent micro-decisions, so those could be subject, color, editing choices, composition, etc. So starting it about first enumerating the aspects of the domain I can control. Playing with them to find what I keep choosing.
I think that is what is meant in the quote above about it finding you. Through constant exposure, you see the things that you keep coming back to or keep showing up.
To do that, I can use the tools below to get me there.
Find a philosophy.
Find something that gives you a frame of reference or an abstraction. I think I am going to start with Wabi-Sabi. Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in the imperfection and changing aspect of life. We often seek perfection and shy away from the changing aging of life. Wabi-Sabi embraces and celebrates this.
I found a number of photography YouTubers discussing Wabi-Sabi and photography, so I plan to play with that. The goal is not to try and take on a style or just accept it, but it provides some starting point to see contrasts on what I like and don't like.
Seek outside sources
I want to look at other arts and graphic design, and plan to get into drawing as a side gig. I think understanding perspective could help my photography.
Building my brain
Build a skill tree and find resources to learn them, and then challenges to grok 'em.
- How to work a camera
- Understanding exposure - Exposure triangle
- Using manual mode
- Lighting
- Composition and Framing - what that all about, learn the rules to break
- Editing
- Color Theory
Start to learn these topics, and I that list will grow as I learn more. Then use the Three C's to drive them home.
The Three C's
Challenges
Here are just a few of the challenges I have done or lined up.
30-day challenges (Volume)
This is just about building routing and getting reps in. I want to accelerate the process for sure, but you need to put in work. Quality comes from quantity. 30-Day challenges are a good way to set aside time with a fixed goal and go for it. A friend a mine every February tries to write N number of songs. The whole month is detected just to songwriting.
Will add some type of constraint. Using one camera, one lens.
As well as try to use the challenge to see some contrasts. Shoot at different times of day, see the contrast between light changes, or season changes.
Manual Mode (Skill)
Learn to shoot in full manual mode and really grok the exposure triangle.
Black & White Challenge (Style/Contrast)
I think shooting a bunch of black and white photos will be good. I don't think it is something I would just normally do, I love the colors man, but it is a great exercise.
Black and white photos are all about the contrast, literally. That is what they capture best.
Style challenges (Style)
Try various types of photography, landscape, portrait, etc.
Build to understand
Building things to help understand things is a really useful tool. There are many ways to do this. This could be many things, like making a pin whole camera.
For me, I wasn't completely clear on the difference between hue, saturation and luminance. Wasn't really clicking for me. I am not sure if I have fully grokked it yet but to help I asked Chat-GPT to build a simple website that mimics the HSL sliders in Lightroom, so I could play with it in isolation, which was helpful.
Lens challenges (Contrast)
Try various focal lengths, but pick one for an extended amount of time.
Creativity/Play/Exploration
For the first few years, I don't have any expectations, just to explore and play.
I bought two cheap cameras. One is a made for kids that has a built-in printer in it. Take a picture and outcomes a black and white photo. It is really fun. I got paper with sticker backing so I could make stickers with it. Super fun has tons of constraints and produces hopefully happy accidents.
Also bought a cheap film camera. I doubt I would ever go full film, but it is to play to see the contrasts.
The goal is to find ways to play and not take it seriously. To have happy accidents.
Permission to suck
This book is about how to accelerate the mastery process, and I still believe in that. That being said, you need time to suck. This is a part of building your brain. Sucking to give yourself permission to explore.
Sucking to get to the point where you get frustrated and decide to find ways to stop sucking. Maybe this is just another way to say fail, but it is ok to suck for a while.
Craft cycle
Further down the line when I want to take it more serious than the craft cycle will kick in.
Meaning, starting to set goals of projects or tasks that require more of my domain. This could be entering competitions or trying to build a book or portfolio. Maybe it is taking on paid gigs. Things that require more than just taking a photo, but more of the space of working in the broader domain of photography.
It is not so much about the outcome but finding harder challenges with external stakes. It is easy as an amateur to just post photos on the gram and call it a day, but to move up need it helps to find ways where there are external stakes so you can't fool yourself.
I need to find ways to fail. Fail to learn.
Cycle
This is a cyclic process.
You learn, and you expand, you change, you grok your domain and that lets you hit another layer. Rinse and repeat.
Like I said, it is a long road, but one I think is really rewarding.
I hope this is helpful and at the very least cleared some of the fog of war of what it means to master something.