When I was a kid, I studied piano. Later on, I went to the Conservatory, and had five years of studying various aspects of music. Although I never get to actually practice my profession , I still have a very strong sense of what that was all about – basically skills that you cultivate, develop over the years, and then put to use.
So, in the end, it’s about you.Not about the brand of the piano, the colour of the piano, the type of chair you sit on in order to play the piano. If you know how to play it, just use your skills and play the piano. If you’re not happy with the results, chances are that you have to work harder, not change the piano.
However, all that started to fade away a bit, when I could finally afford buying all sort of (amazing by the way) music toys – synths, workstations, etc. Beautiful. Sounded absolutely brilliant, only a tiny problem with them, I did not have the skills, nor the need for them. At the end, I was just a pianist. My strength was in playing, improvising, actually feeling and using an instrument, not tuning and programming. Different skills.
So every time I wanted to use one of the new shiny toys I ended up re installing Windows or hunting for drivers on the Internet. Not good.
Still today, the greatest joy I get from playing an all simple 76 keys electric Yamaha upright piano. My exquisite Roland V synth GT is still in a case, hasn’t seen any use for almost a year now.
Photography is a new area for me, but the symptoms are still the same.
So what a joy it was in Morocco that, due to force majeure (a 50mm Canon smashed and salt water in my Mamiya system), I ended up photographing with an old venerable Nikon FE2 with a 35 mm. Just that. A 30 years old camera, one lens, and imagination. Use what you have, instead of changing lenses, zoom in, zoom out etc… I don’t even care about the results, the feeling was beautiful. It reminded me of the joy of just playing the piano – not tweaking effects, setting up routes, all that teckie stuff I was never too fond off anyway, but doing what I love – playing.
Many photographers say that one great way of improving your photography is to limit your options, force yourself to be creative with what you’ve got, instead of jumping back and forth between different options.
I’ve tried it, it works.
I used to play a little piano, learned in and old german semi grand and still, cannot get used to electronic keyboards … is the wire tension and the mechanical interface. Taking about options, I have found that if I forced myself to work only in aperture priority, use manual focus, and use a fixed focal length lens, photography improves dramatically! That is why I am looking forward for an M9 and leave behind my Nikon D700 (for most purposes), it forces me too look through a viewfinder with area wider than actual picture circle, it forces me to focus or prefocus and in many instances, use hyper focal focusing distances which pretty much only Leica manual lenses still have printed in the barrel. And, technique? I have found that the only real thing truly helping is drawing and perspective, the other stuff, apertures and speed, has become second nature.