Every damn day.

As both a photographer and a musician, the biggest challenge I have is time. Not ideas, basic skills or gear. Time. We get bogged down in the every day BS that is life. And traveling here and doing that keeps us off the thrown, keyboards and camera.

But we know it is important. We can feel it in everything we do. Practice. Perfect practice is the only way to excellence. Not how many hours, but simply hours.

I love my iPhone camera for its ease. But I should be no less interested in bringing out the entire gear kit with me when I go places. Or even the view camera kit. The time it takes to even set that camera up is a killer. And it shouldn't be. It should be a joy.

But it takes us away from the other things we are committed to. Work. Paperwork. Family. Commute. The list is endless... and many items on it precious to us. And important.

So what do you do when you feel the time running by and nothing getting done? Collapse more into the quicksand of self-pity and self-doubt? Or take incremental steps toward the regaining of some of your creative life back?

For me it was getting some smaller, less expensive cameras for the journey. Easy to use and still get images I like. iPhone camera, P&S. It was a new electric keyboard with headphones for playing after the family has gone to bed. Soon an electric drumkit will occupy one corner of the den for the same purpose.

I need to practice. Every day...

Every damn day. : Photocine News:

"My conversation with Stanton reminded me of the cold truthful words of my first agent, Michael De Martini, who fostered the start of my fashion photography career. I presented him with a set of damn good images. He even said they were good photographs. Then he looked and me and said, “if I want good, I’ll talk to ninety percent of the photographers out there. If you shoot for me, you shoot brilliantly or you don’t shoot at all.” And so started a period of shooting and re-shooting the same thing over and over again until I found the subtleties."