Capturing the Moment

I've done a decent amount of traveling these past couple of years. I've been to a lot of really beautiful places and seen them captured in gorgeous pictures in various guidebooks and on travel websites. Also, a quick Flickr search for sunsets, long exposure photography, water photography, snow photography, or just about anything else you can think of will return thousands and thousands of fantastic pictures taken by scores of different people all over the world. Some of those images so perfectly capture moments or images that you can get lost in them and perhaps spend hours searching through other people's photo albums.

I've always had an interest in photography but my recent travel experience has heightened it. On my travels I took my pictures with a fairly old, 3.2 megapixel camera. It was light, easy to use, and the pictures were good quality. I have taken a lot of pictures in the last couple of years. But most of them look like holiday snaps. You know what I mean, they're not artistic, they're just pictures of a monument or a bridge or a church or one of the world's natural wonders, and sometimes I'm there in the foreground. I don't mean to say that like it's a bad thing but there are lots of pictures like that around. They're not unique. And while I'm glad I have them to remind me of where I've been, it would have also been nice if I had taken some more artistic shots of the places I've visited.

With this in mind I recently got myself a dSLR. It's a nice one, with high resolution, great manual controls, and couple of zoom lenses giving me a lot of flexibility to try all sorts of photography. I was so excited to get it because it meant I could get out there and start snapping away, experimenting, and hopefully take some nice pictures along the way. I thought it would be a nice hobby and also a way to express myself creatively. So far, in the eight-or-so weeks I've had the camera I've only taken a couple of hundred pictures and most of those were for other people (friends wanting pictures for their blogs or websites, etc). Inaction is becoming a recurring theme in my blog, isn't it?

Why haven't I been out there in the national parks and on the beaches taking pictures like mad? I have a reasonable enough grasp of the principles of photography, having taken a photography-related course at university. My camera is easy enough to use and, being digital, you can instantly see when you've made a mistake with exposure, focus, or framing, etc. and can correct it accordingly. Also, a couple of my friends are amazing photographers and if I ever needed help or advice I'm sure they'd be happy to oblige. In addition, I've read lots of books on photography and I read the Digital Photography School blog almost every day. (Incidentally, it's a great resource for anyone even remotely interested in photography - I encourage everyone to check it out). I've learned a lot by reading but there comes a point where you can be reading too widely and spending too much time doing it.

Reading about something can be a great way to learn. It can also be detrimental. I think that it becomes detrimental when you find yourself reading how-to book after how-to book and never actually get around to doing anything yourself. That's the trap. And it's a trap I've fallen into more than once. I was reminded of this last night when I was reading Alex Epstein's blog, Complications Ensue, a blog about screenwriting. Someone had posted a question for him asking whether an expensive set of DVDs about how to be a filmmaker sounded like a good investment. Apparently the set contained detailed information on every individual craft involved in making a film. Alex's answer to that question was, in short, 'no'. Basically, he said that instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a set of DVDs, it would be far better to buy (or borrow from a library) any of the existing books written about filmmaking. He went on to say something that I don't think a lot of people understand:

"... neither books nor DVDs are going to teach you how to make short films. Not really. What teaches you to make short films is making short films."

In short, you learn how to do something by actually trying to do it. He said that reading a book to learn about something is fine, so long as it doesn't prevent you from rolling up your sleeves and having a go at it. His tip: read one book and then make one film. Then, read another book and make another film - don't get stuck just reading books. It's great advice and I remember reading that same advice about six or seven years ago. The author of the advice when I originally read it was Alex Epstein. The same guy.

I had first read the advice in Alex's book, Crafty Screenwriting, one of the dozens of screenwriting and filmmaking books I read, one after the other, while trying to gain the knowledge and confidence to start writing a screenplay of my own. Even back then I knew it was probably the best piece of advice any of those books could impart to me because it encouraged action. For months I had been reading every filmmaking book I could find and, while I'd learned a lot, I wasn't doing anything with that newly-acquired knowledge. It didn't matter how much of it I got, all that knowledge was basically useless unless I did something with it.

I don't remember if I actually followed the advice all those years ago but I remember reading it and thinking that it was well worth filing away for future reference. What's interesting is that all these years later I stumbled onto Alex's blog (after following a link on a friend's blog) and read the same advice all over again, just as I'm experiencing the same problem: being bogged down reading books and not actually getting my hands dirty.

What was perhaps more interesting was that years before I even wanted to be a screenwriter (I had my heart set on a very different career) I was writing screenplays but I was doing it for fun. Before I started university I had written two and a half feature film scripts. Dreamworks hasn't knocked my door down to offer me millions for them - and trust me, they aren't going to - but I wrote them, all by myself, before I read even one book about how to write a screenplay. They're bad screenplays but they're bad screenplays I wrote and, at the time, I didn't even care that they were bad. Back then, the writing process wasn't painful and it was quite quick, so what's happened in the intervening years? It seems that the more I learned about screenwriting and filmmaking, the less confident I became. I retained a lot of the information I read but I started thinking about things too much. I think, especially in creative endeavours, that it's probably best not to think about things much at all and just get in there and start experimenting. There's no reason you can't seek information out as you go but doing all the reading and research ahead of time is probably a significantly greater hindrance than it is a help. Obviously, you can't do things in this order if you want to be a surgeon but if you're just writing a script or making a film then what's the harm?

What is harmful is never writing that script, never making that film, never taking that photograph. Even if all you end up with is something awful, if you put your heart and mind into it then it was worthwhile. If you try and fail you at least learn from the experience. To never try, that's probably the greatest failure you can chalk up. That's good advice, I must have it tattooed on my chest so I don't forget it...