Practice is the best of all instructors

Music school provided a great photography education; that's where I learned to practice. And you do learn to practice. Practice in itself is a skill. Yet photographers are generally not taught how to practice. To practice music, you deconstruct the process of playing, isolate the problems, and work on the specific techniques demanded by the music. It requires repetition and intense focus. Some musical structures like scales and arpeggios are common to almost all music, and musicians practice these particularly intensely because mastering these basic building blocks makes a lot of the repertoire significantly easier to deal with. At its heart practice is about reducing variables and whittling the problems down to their most basic forms in order to solve them so when you perform you don't need to think about them— you can forget about the scales and concentrate on larger, more musical issues like phrasing and expression. To this end composers and pedagogues create etudes, musical works designed to address specific problems.

The still life photos below are a few examples of photographic etudes that I create for myself. These particular examples are composition studies. I often make similar exercises for lighting. There is nothing complicated here, these are intentionally very simple photographs of simple subjects right out of the kitchen. The goal is to remove color, perspective, lighting (to the degree possible), and timing from the equation in order to concentrate on the relationship between the shape of the subject and its relationship to the frame of the photo—the heart of photographic composition. I've kept the light very simple: one light directly behind a semi-opaque plexiglass surface on which the subject is placed, a reflector, and one lens. This allows me to isolate compositional questions that photographers face in every photograph: when and why does a subject require negative space? what happens to the composition when the subject intersects the frame? how is it different when it only intersects one or two edges of the frame, when does a centered composition work and why? Like scales and arpeggios in music, these problems are basic building blocks of photographic thinking, but we rarely see it this way because we are also thinking about light direction and quality, expression, exposure, focus, perspective and any number of other variables. But if you can master the basic principles in isolation, shooting creative photos becomes easier—you will be able to evaluate the photographic potential of your subject, whether it's a rock star or a slice of cucumber, more effectively. Also, it is very Important that practice provides a safe place to make mistakes. Musicians are often told that they should sound their worst when they practice; if they sound good, they are practicing the wrong things. While working professionally, you can't afford mistakes and this limits your expressive repertoire. Practice and personal work allows you to confront ideas you wouldn't attempt on a real job and stretch your creative range.

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Etudes

Garlic Scapes 2

Garlic Scapes 3

Cucumber Seeds

Cucumber Slice

Cucumber Slice

Ramen Noodles