Practice doesn’t make perfect, and that’s why you should practice even more

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I am a huge advocate of daily photography. I try to take photographs wherever I am, whatever I’m doing. One reason is that there’s always an image waiting to be made, but also because I believe the more we do it, the better we get at it.

Surely, blind practice can be detrimental in deterministic scenarios, like basketball: sticking to a bad shooting technique when you are missing all your shots can make you a worse player in the long run. Practice doesn’t always make perfect without feedback and corrections.

But what does “perfect” even mean in photography as an art?

When we take photographs often, we become more familiar with our camera, our process, dealing with different subjects and lighting conditions, and post-processing.

More importantly, spending a bit of time every day paying attention to our surroundings, looking for something worthwhile to capture, can only make us better observers.

And above all, mistakes are not to be avoided in photography. Experimentation is fundamental to growing as an artist, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.

There’s never been perfection in art, and there will never be.

Why I don’t do any location scouting

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I don’t believe in location scouting when it comes to landscape and fine art photography.

It’s not that I don’t find value in exploring a place before a planned shoot; it’s just that I don’t do it with the only purpose of “gathering information”, as it’s usually understood.

There’s only a first time for everything: you’ll only see a place with completely fresh eyes once. The second time you visit a location, you’ve already built some preconceived ideas about it. Over time, we may only be able to see a very limited amount of images in that location.

It is during that first time that our minds are most open. If we have a camera with us, we can play and experiment more freely; if we leave it at home, we prevent ourselves from even trying.

Deciding beforehand what the “right” and “wrong” time might be for a location we don’t even know can be a costly mistake.