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 pressures of day-to-day humdrum existence, you know, stop us from doing so. So quite often we are kind of confined to taking pictures that, you know, 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 are not doing the small incremental exercises that allow us then to use our photographic eyes as much as possible when we are actually taking photographs. The simplest way to do this, which you can do any time, on the school run, on the commute, while you are 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 am looking at my mental piece, like I just think, okay, well how would I photograph that? There is a couple of picture frames, you know, like a Buddha head and some sort of German 1950s vars, you know, could I photograph them in an interesting way? That is kind of what I would 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, the more that you are training up that muscle, that eye, to see the possibility in everything that surrounds 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 mental piece with some things on, but as a place to explore, with a different vision. Some of my favourite 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 you're some amazing landscape. There is kind of like, near not really worth photographing. So take the time to 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 Brisson. The reason these two are so interesting is because Cartier Brisson wrote this book called the decisive moment, which is all about capturing that 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 stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, 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 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 Joe Mivitz, because he's a, he's a font of knowledge as to me 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 what's going on, how we kind of zone 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 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 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, 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, or to brief period of taking photographs is to have a plan back when I was a photo student. And of course, as long before, you know, smartphones and tablets, I'm like, I don't sound like a really long before that. I used to have a tiny A5 Harbanc 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 phone or, you know, you know, sketch things out in a book. But once you start committing these things to something, then they are in your brain. It's kind of going in hand and 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, okay, well, I've seen this sort of idea with trees. I've seen that sort of idea 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, it's been hired and everybody 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 said, 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, at least as a starting point with your trained eye that is keen to see possibilities that you may not be aware of. And there's 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 Brisson and his decisive moment, how you can applaud in your own photography. Check out this video over here. I know that you'll find it fascinating. Thank you every so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.