 how's it? How's it? Unless you are a professional photographer it is unlikely that you have as much time as you would like to practice your photography. This is how I actually practice and improve my photographic skills without even having a camera. We have all been there isn't it? We really want to go and take some photographs but the the pressures of day-to-day hum drum exist and stop us from doing so. So quite often we are kind of confined to taking pictures at very short intervals and we spend a lot of the beginning of that interval rushing around trying to make the most of that limited time that we have and the problem with that is that you are trying to exercise a muscle or in this case a photographic vision your photographic eye when it hasn't really been developed because we're not doing the small incremental exercises that allow us then to use our photographic eyes as much as is possible when we are actually out taking photographs. The simplest way to do this which you can do anytime on the school run on the on the commute while you're sitting on the train while you are at a doctor's office what doesn't matter just take a moment to look around you to see the things in front of you to see beyond what they normally are and think about them in terms of potential photographs just idly think you know right now I'm looking at my my mantle piece like I just think okay well how would I photograph that there's a couple of picture frames you know like a Buddha head and some sort of German 1950s vase you know could I photograph them in an interesting way that's kind of what I'd like you to start doing is to think about the things that are in front of you to stop just dismissing them and wasting that time the more that you do this then the more that you are training up that muscle that eye to see the possibility in in everything that's around you and I think you'd be surprised if you haven't done this before just how interesting things can be when you stop thinking of them simply as you know a mantle piece with some things on but as a place to explore with a different vision some of my favorite photographs are of objects that are commonplace but they are shown to us in a way that is just it's incredible because you're like wow that's amazing right it's such a pinprick to that balloon of an idea that says you know we need to go somewhere amazing to take photographs then unless the scenery is spectacular or less it's some sort of huge metropolis you know or some amazing landscape that is kind of like near not really worth photographing so take the time to look look closer to home if you've been around photography for even a really short period you've no doubt come across the phrase the decisive moment and heard the name Henry Cartier-Bresson the reason these two are so intelligent is because Cartier-Bresson wrote this book called The Decisive Moment which is all about capturing that fleeting fleeting moment when the picture happens when there is something that occurs that elevates it from just something you know pretty to a great photograph now you kind of look at that and go well surely he's just kind of machine guns his way through things and just snap snap snap snap and then you know then you get that peak moment and it's not really that simple or tricky depending on how you want to look at it it's more about learning to read what's going on in front of you to learn to anticipate the scene that is unfolding before your eyes you again can do this on your commutes or you know when you're sitting having a coffee possibly on a Paris boulevard or maybe in a Starbucks in sort of you know middle America no matter where you are learn to read that action watch the ebb and the flow of the crowds if you're at a train station for example you know that every you know a couple of minutes when a train arrives people will jump off the train people will get on the train there will be crowds and then there will be silence practice being tuned in to these these passages of time of how things pan out again going back to Joel Myovitz because he's a he's a font of knowledge has to be said you know he talks about standing on a street corner and letting the world just kind of flow past him for a while so he kind of gets over this idea of the mundanity of of what's going on how he kind of zoned things out and once he stopped zoning things out then all of a sudden something interesting happens that out of that just averageness begins to surface the interesting things in the averageness because you're starting to pay attention to them again and and I think there's a fascinating thing we can only do this when you're actually just sitting being tuned into what's going on and being aware of of the events that surround you you see when you put these two ideas together you know the looking and the awareness already you are practicing your photography and and training up your photographic eyes so that when you do get a chance to take photographs to be out there with purpose with your camera then you're not spending half an hour trying to get back into the groove of taking pictures of of you know stretching and limbering up you know you're making the best use of your time and another way to make even better use of that all too brief period of taking photographs is to have a plan back when I was a photo student and of course it was long before you know smartphones and tablets all that kind of sound like a really long before that I used to have a tiny a five hardback book that I would jot down in little thumbnail sketches ideas that I had for photographs now this used to come from all sorts of random places you know tv shows and you know paintings and something I saw in a book or just you know an idea that maybe just popped into my head and I would jot them down and go okay well this is something to revisit maybe later on and I would encourage you to do this as well depending on however you want to do you can simply take you know pictures with your with your phone or you know indeed you know sketch things out in a book but once you start committing these things to something then they are in your your brain it's kind of going in hand in hand with that visual library that you're building up of pictures that you enjoy so you have that pool of inspiration to draw from later on and by making conscious effort to write things down it's funny how much these things go into your actual I don't want to say personality but the way that you think about photographs the way that you have at least a starting point if you go to a landscape then you might go oh okay well I've seen this sort of idea with trees I've seen that sort of idea with with rocks or you know whatever same with portraits if you are going to a you know a model shoot one of these kind of sessions where there's a model you know there's been hired anybody goes and looks then if you have some ideas then at least you're not on the spot trying to come up with something right you've got a base already this is what I want to try and you've got focus and you've got direction and when you couple the focus and direction about what it is you want to take pictures of all this is a starting point with your trained eye that is keen to see possibilities that you may not be aware of and and is aware also of the little things that separate a good photograph from something that has a wow you know that people can't quite put their finger on because all the stars have aligned this is what you're doing when you're training your eyes day in day out even when you don't have a camera even when you're in the most mundane of situations start to think photographically at the very least it will help those very boring times go quickly to find out more about Henry Cartier-Bresson and his decisive moment how you can apply in your own photography check out this video over here I know that you'll find it fascinating thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon