Photography- My NEW OLD Hobby

In my last blog post I talked about the importance of hobbies and skills.

Shameless plug over here :P

To me, being lucky is figuring out exactly what you're passionate about at a young age. You get to skip over years of uncertainty and searching for the thing.

Now in my early 30s, I find myself doing just that. Trying to figure out my thing.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the famous entrepreneur, is all about going all in on what you're truly passionate about. That way you won't be miserable throughout the process.

That all sounds great and dandy but the problem here is what happens if you don't know what you're passionate about? Well, Gary's advice is that you have to be patient and try EVERYTHING you can.

I tried to go back to drawing and although it was fun and exciting to put pencil back to paper and "create" again, I soon found myself getting more frustrated with the lack of progress and the disappointing results that I was producing.

I even tried hard to push and power through with hours of sketching and practice but not knowing if I was truly making any progress and the lack of any sort of guidance led to too much uncertainty and doubt.

In the end, drawing itself became more of a chore, stress, and burden.

And from what I understand, you should be enjoying the journey(process) and not just the destination(end result).

PHOTOGRAPHY

I didn't grow up taking pictures.

It just wasn't something I was interested in or concerned with at the time.

The first time I started taking pictures was back in 2006 when my Auntie was kind enough to gift to me a Sony Ericsson W900i phone.

That phone made me the coolest kid in college(it was a really small college) with it's swivel action, ability to play music, and the whopping 2 Megapixel camera.

And with that 2 megapixel camera I managed to document lots of our college life. Pictures and videos that I still have to this day and can look back fondly on.

It wasn't until late 2014 that my wife and I got our first "proper" camera.

A Sony Alpha 5100.

It was here with this very camera that I realized that I actually like taking pictures.

For every event or trip we went on I would always bring it along with me. Especially for our trips to Singapore and Japan. I even managed to use up all 64 GB of our SD card in the last Japan trip back in 2018.

Taking pictures is a very common thing nowadays. Most of us take pictures on a daily basis with our smartphones and with smartphone camera technology getting better and better every few months, the general need for a big and clunky device with too many buttons and controls seems highly unnecessary.

And that's where I feel that photography might be where my passion lies because I absolutely love learning about those extra buttons and controls.

Initially I started out using my camera with settings on "Superior Auto". With these settings the camera will expose the scene according to what it thinks is correct. And generally that was god enough for me for awhile until I started noticing the downside of always having it on auto. In not so ideal situations the image quality would not always come out the way I wanted it to. And that's where I started to dive a little deeper into figuring out how to actually get full control of my camera.

The best part of it all is that it never feels like a chore. Sure, some days I get a little burnt out learning but I'm usually back to reading up about camera gear and how to get clear and sharp images the next day. Until today I still find it all fascinating and I'm still learning.

I honestly don't know if it's something that I'll be interested in doing forever but right now I'm just trying to enjoy it as much as possible without any unnecessary stress added to it. I'm not looking to make it into a job or to make money out of it. I just want to enjoy the process while I can.

Like they say, "It's the journey".