For years, I had wanted to learn photography. I managed to make photography complicated before I had really started.
I read about settings. I looked at cameras. I tried to understand what equipment I might need and worried about not knowing how to use any of it properly.
It was quite easy to turn something I wanted to try into something I first needed to prepare for.
I could learn the basics. Choose a camera. Work out which lens I would need. Understand aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Then, once I knew enough, I could start taking photographs.
That was the sensible order. It was also a very good way not to start.
Starting small, starting now
At home, reading the ikigai book, I decided to do it differently. I wasn’t going to buy a camera. Not yet. I wasn’t going to learn everything first either.
I would start with what I already had.
It was one of those cold Lithuanian winter days. I took my phone and went walking with Eika. Snow lay everywhere and the sky was grey. I started taking pictures.
Snow-covered branches. Fallen trunks lying under the snow. Paths disappearing between the trees. Eika sitting in the snow.
I didn’t really know what I was doing. And, for once, that wasn’t a reason to stop.
Another picture
Without settings to master or equipment to figure out, there wasn’t much left to do except look. I pointed the phone at things that caught my attention and tried to work out what exactly I liked about them.
Sometimes what I saw didn’t survive the photograph at all. Something that had looked beautiful in front of me became completely ordinary on the screen.
So I took another picture. The same fallen birch, a little different each time.
Some were better. Quite a few weren’t. Nothing terrible happened. There was something unexpectedly freeing in that.
I still wanted to learn photography. That hadn’t changed.
What changed was the order.
I didn’t have to understand photography before taking photographs. I didn’t need to know which camera to buy before finding out whether I even enjoyed carrying one around. And I didn’t have to turn a new interest into another thing I needed to do properly from the beginning.
The camera could wait. So could the lenses, the settings and all the things I still didn’t understand. For the moment, my phone was enough.
And perhaps starting this way would let me learn something else first: what catches my eye, what makes me stop, what I keep trying to fit inside a frame.
One frame at a time
I came home from that walk with a collection of winter photographs. Some I liked. Some I didn’t. Some looked nothing like what I remembered seeing. But that wasn’t really the point.
I had finally stopped preparing to start.
I don’t know yet where photography will take me. I expect I’ll eventually want a camera. I’ll learn what the settings do, make plenty of mistakes and probably find new ways of making the whole thing unnecessarily complicated again.