I think the best advice to give any beginner is to just start doing.
Probably all my life I tried to improve by reading.
These two facts resulted in me not trying, not getting better at anything I wanted to do.
I think part of the problem reflects in the expression "I am ..." I am an artist, writer, photographer, musician. These words suggest that being a photographer is a state of mind, when it is really an action. A photographer is only a photographer if he/she actually goes out and produces photographs. Just knowing how to produce an image is not enough.
It took me quite a while to acknowledge this truth. It took me some more months to act upon it.
I am currently experimenting with the polaroid camera I bought on ebay a few weeks ago, and the shot above is the only one I like so far. It is not easy, this practising thing. I want to be better at this, past the beginning stage. I want to like more than one out of 12 (expensive) images. But the feeling this 12th picture gave me, this feeling that perhaps I might be capable of doing more, that I might get past this stage someday, it made it all worth it.
