My grandson and his mother lived with me up until he was about two. I would take him to the playground at the nearby school to play on the swing. He was just beginning to walk so it was a good time to practice that skill. Not sure he saw it as practice but more of a way to discover the world. We constantly stopped. He would squat to check out things many of us never see: the ants streaming across the sidewalk, a dandelion, a caterpillar. I had to get down on my knees to see what I was missing. I loved this place he was in: the wonder, awe, watching, observing. Without realizing it he was teaching me to look, observe and experience the moment. Grateful for the lessons from my grandson.
“Succesful people are succesful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently. Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one, they don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and the don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond. You become a winner because you’re good at losing. The hard part about losing is that you might permit it to give strength to the resistance, that you might believe that you don’t deserve to win, that you might, in some dark corner of your soul, give up.” from Linchpin by Seth Goodin
I’ve deleted a few images from my hard drive since I started working with digital photography. Those images were lessons learned.
Yesterday I approached a mother and her daughter in an attempt to get an image of the young girls face that was smeared with ice cream. I was told no. I thanked her and moved on. A lesson learned.
A few years ago I’ve arrived early for a morning sunrise photo session only to realize I’d forgot the L-bracket to mount my camera on my tripod. A lesson learned.
Turn Vibration Reduction off when camera is mounted on a tripod. A lesson learned.
Because I did not check the background I now have a couple of images with antlers protruding from my fathers head. Lesson learned. Funny looking though. 🙂
