Every damn day.

Brilliant art is made in the subtleties. Subtlety can only be found through obsessive repetition of the craft.

Last week I was sitting with drummer Stanton Moore after a show. He was criticizing his performance. From my outsider perspective I thought he looked and sounded flawless. But from his obsessive perspective, he felt a little off. He wished that he had the opportunity to get in a few more days of practice the previous week. I thought about what he said. This is a world renowned drummer that, if he were comatose, he could still turn in a jaw dropping performance. Just like a photographer with 25 years experience would find it difficult to take a bad picture. But that’s not it, is it. True brilliance only comes with practice, no matter how experienced you are.

The excuse I hear the most from people who are holding down a regular job at the same time that they are building their photography career is that they have trouble finding the time to shoot. That’s because they consider a shoot a planned and produced event. The truth is any photography you do will make you a better photographer.

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.

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