I have been thinking of writing this post for about a week now, but struggled with finding a proper way to introduce it. Until now that is. It turns out that David Duchemin just happpened to provide the perfect segway for what I am about to say in his latest blog post. David discusses some misconceptions surrounding the concept of “professional” photographer and insists on the importance of learning in the creative process. It really doesn’t matter if you are a pro or amateur, the minute you stop learning and pushing yourself further, you might as well quit. I have to say I couldn’t agree more. I was in fact reminded of this fact no later than last week as I was teaching a private workshop on architectural photography. It is quite fascinating in fact to be in a situation where people come to you for instruction and teaching, but if you play it right you can end up learning as much out of it yourself. While you are teaching you actually take a step back and get a much needed refresher on the basics. In addition, as you are looking for elements to illustrate the principles you teach you get even more perspective. If that wasn’t enough, this amazing thing happens when you have several people looking at the same subject: subjectivity. It is amazing how many times you pick a location, put 5-6 photographers in there and come out with as many interpretations as there are people around!

So here I am on my workshop, teaching that you don’t always have to trust or even care about your metering. You can choose to under or overexpose subjects just because. So with that in mind, we are on location and I am out and about giving tips and tricks to my participants, completely oblivious to my own teachings, when one of them surprises me with an image of this location which I had never envisaged, but which stems directly of that very element I was teaching. So it is without shame that I admit that the following image was completely inspired by Hagen, whose pictures you will see in my next post.

This is the image I would have shot otherwise: