My New Passion and Why You Should Pursue Yours

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Have you ever had something you’ve really wanted to learn how to do, but couldn’t seem to pry yourself away from work long enough to actually get it done?  Yeah, me too.

My whole life I’ve had an interest in photography.  I’ve always wanted the ability to be able to capture the photo that would make people say “wow”.  However, up until recently I never really put much effort into it.  My high school photography teacher told me that my pinhole camera was one of the worst constructed she’d ever seen – needless to say that class left me slightly disillusioned.

More importantly, I think I always thought that I had to have a decent camera in order to be able to learn the skills necessary to become a good photographer.  The reality is that this is partly true.  In college I had a decent Canon point and shoot with some manual settings, which allowed me to experiment a little bit, but the frustration of the cumbersome menu systems never really did much for me.  Sure you can practice composition and things like that, but when it takes two minutes just to go in and change the aperature, my ADD got the best of me.  I think I was able to take one good photo with that camera.

The one Photo I liked - Proxy Falls

About a year and a half ago my dad, who was always a natural at taking photos, went out and bought a Nikon D90. Alright, now we are talking!   I’d always wanted a DSLR, but never actually thought I would ever get one.  I spent the next year stealing his camera and pretending like I knew what I was doing.  People would look at me like I was an actual photographer.  Ha. Little did they know how clueless I was…Either way, it was awesome even if I never really did much to perfect my skills.

Looking back I realized that the times I did have the camera I was just so excited to take photos with it that I wasn’t thinking about how to take better photos with it.  It was always on a weekend or when I was doing some other kind of traveling, and I just could never motivate myself to make the time to do it.

Throughout all that, I’d still never actually thought about the prospect of buying one myself.

Until I decided to move to Thailand.

I knew I was going to be living abroad for at least 6 months and would probably never have a better opportunity to hone my skills.  After a month of debating, and a long lecture from my girlfriend about how I would regret it if I didnt buy it, I went out and bought a Nikon D5000 with an 18-200mm Sigma lens.

Quite possibly one of the best purchases of my life.

I’ve never been the most artistic person.  Let me rephrase that, I suck at any thing artistic.

I can’t draw, I can’t paint, and you should see some of the pottery that I created a  few years ago – it’s that bad.

So the concept of being able to be artistic regardless of my lack of traditional artistic skills was really exciting to me.  I’ve now spent the last 6 months actually learning how to use my camera, and learning the basics of what it can do.  That coupled with a newfound affinity for HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography, and I’ve found a passion that will stick with me for awhile.

The best part about living the location independent lifestyle is that it is easy to make time for things like taking photos.  Whenever the light is right I can hop up on the roof and snap a few shots.  If I want to take a day off and spend all day walking around the city with my camera, I can!

There is a lot of talk about the more grandiose aspects of working for yourself and being location independent.  For as great as all of that is, it is often the little things that make everything so fulfilling.  I’ve been able to swim laps every day this week.  I’ve swam more in the last 7 days than I have in the last 7 years.

Sun setting over Manila with Manila Bay in the Background

Another added benefit of regaining your time  is that many of the things I love to do are learning skills that will benefit the business side of my life at one point later on anyway.  Perhaps it’s learning how to take a professional quality photo, and then learning how to touch it up using Photoshop.  I spent an entire day awhile back doing Lynda tutorials for Adobe Illustrator.  What once would have taken up an entire Saturday, and probably wouldn’t have ever gotten done, can now be done whenever I want.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the busyness of life.  Don’t forget to take the time out to do the things that make you happy.  Over the last six months I’ve developed a much stronger sense of why I want to life this kind of life.  When all of this began I think it mostly came down to the fact that I was slowly suffocating from the tie I had to wear everyday.  Now I recognize all of the little benefits that come along with regaining your time.

The core purpose of this post is to get you to think about your goals and your passions that you may have neglected to make time for.  You only have so much time in the day, you might as well spend as much of it as possible doing things you love.

You can find more examples of me exploring my passion for HDR photography on my new site.

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