Does practice make perfect?

click photo to enlarge

"Travel broadens the mind" people say, and everyone agrees without a moment's hesitation. It can, but often it doesn't: it all depends on the mind. Moreover, tourism shouldn't be confused with travel. "Practice makes perfect", is another of those sayings that elicits widespread agreement. You only have to include it in your sentence to find heads going up and down, sagely, like so many nodding donkeys. And yet, if my life's experience is anything to go by, you're just as likely to come upon someone who regularly repeats a task without any discernible improvement in performance as you are the person who exhibits advancement in their chosen activity.

It seems to me that with some activities many of us achieve a level that we deem to be "good enough", and don't improve further. I recognise this in quite a few of my DIY skills. Take paper-hanging and painting. I've done this activity (with my wife) on and off for more than thirty years. The end result today is better than when I started out, but I don't think it's any improvement over the standard I achieved fifteen or twenty years ago. I'm happy enough with the outcome and don't aspire to any kind of perfection. I could probably say the same, with one or two qualifications, about my guitar playing, though here I do have the desire to improve! The fact is, practice alone is not enough to achieve improvement. For that to happen there has to be the application of rigorous thought, reflection and the careful assessment of one's performance. In a lot of practice, including that involving the hobby and profession of photography, the thinking, reflecting and assessing quite often seems spasmodic or completely absent, and frequently plays second fiddle to carrying out the activity at the already achieved level. For many people practice involves working on areas of weaknesses, and there's nothing wrong with that so long as you don't let your strengths atrophy. No, practice alone isn't necessarily the road to improvement.

The two people in today's photograph, gazing out to sea from the beach at Skegness, Lincolnshire, though they don't look it, are in fact practicing. They are members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and they have just used the tractor and trailer to launch the inshore lifeboat carrying their colleagues on an exercise. Their line of work requires regular practice, and may involve more of it than actual life-saving. Over the years I've taken a few photographs of this organisation at work in activities as varied as doing the Sunday wash and, yes, practising for the real thing.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm
F No: 7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Summer colours in spring

click photo to enlarge
As I stood on the shingle at Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, and gazed at this building I reflected that you just can't plan for an English spring. In recent days the weather had been fluctuating between warm and bright, and overcast and chilly, with night-time frosts when the sky was clear. We'd put our fleeces on, then cast them, then put them back on again. Gloves and hats had been necessary at 9.00, but packed away by 10.30. However, on Wednesday afternoon, replete with fish and chips, hazy cloud and RAF Typhoons above, and jacketless in a crisp wind, we walked out to this Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) station. And, as we did the cloud cleared to reveal the deepest azure blue. It was April 1st, but the blue sky and bright colours made it seem like August 1st.

Brightness and colour like this, after an English winter, seems almost Mediterranean in its intensity, and on that walk a lot of people with cameras seemed driven to record it. However, I appeared to be the only one fixated by this structure that houses the local lifeboats - everyone else was snapping yachts or each other. The building itself was interesting enough: a well-lit, pleasing combination of shapes and colour, with a flag next to it adding a vertical accent. However, it was the two yellow beach markers that really made the arrangement stand out for me. Though only small in the viewfinder, these two points of complementary brightness intensified the deepness of the blue, completed the set of primary colours, and made a contribution that far outweighed their size. So, I walked around and arranged this composition with the building to the left, the markers to the right, a bit of sea for context, plenty of foreground shingle, and just as much blue sky. With any luck I'll be by the coast again when bright colours abound, but, after the turn the weather has taken - cold easterly winds, low cloud, and bits of drizzle - I think that will be in August!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 13mm (26mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1600 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On