16,000 steps

Saturday’s photo walk with the Toronto Photo Walk group was a great success.

We met at a coffee shop at the south end of Bathurst Street just east of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto and began making new friends right away. By the end of the walk (which ended at a beer pub!) we’d walked over 16,000 steps.

One of the nice things about getting together with other photographers is you’re bound to be introduced to some amazing photographers who you may have never heard about but who are shooting amazing images.

I’m a pretty good photographer and I should be after almost 60 years of shooting with 50 of them as a professional photographer for newspapers and national magazines.

That said there are men and women who walk among us who can shoot me under the table ….and I love it.

Learning how to see and learning how to walk and see are learnable skills. Nothing surprises me more than to be looking at the same thing a bunch of other photographers are seeing and realizing later that their published images (often on Facebook) are way better than mine.

My shots are technically excellent. I know how to shoot with my cameras but my ability to see an image before I shoot needs work.

I am considering buying a medium 2 1/4″ square format film camera for the sole reason that shooting with some of these bemouths requires a great deal more thinking than shooting.

This slowing down the process of walking and seeing is the beginning to shooting fine art photography.