what else would you do?

This is a really interesting case study in personality types....

I thought about what types of hobbies I have engaged in over the years and they all turned out to be things like guitar playing, Mtn. Biking, snowboarding, climbing, or in the case of my early childhood years, photography. But they were never things like say, stamp or coin collecting.

And in every case, if after trying my best at it for a reasonable amount of time I was still not very good, then I would not enjoy it. That was the case in mountain biking after a couple years, so I gave it up.

I like to challenge my self, compete and reach as high as I can. If I were not good at a hobby, I would not enjoy it and I would move on. We are all different....
 
KM-25 said:
This is a really interesting case study in personality types....

I thought about what types of hobbies I have engaged in over the years and they all turned out to be things like guitar playing, Mtn. Biking, snowboarding, climbing, or in the case of my early childhood years, photography. But they were never things like say, stamp or coin collecting.

And in every case, if after trying my best at it for a reasonable amount of time I was still not very good, then I would not enjoy it. That was the case in mountain biking after a couple years, so I gave it up.

I like to challenge my self, compete and reach as high as I can. If I were not good at a hobby, I would not enjoy it and I would move on. We are all different....
Click to expand...

It is better to start off not very good and improve steadily from there. Whilst I agree that natural aptitude is good, the capacity for continued improvement makes the journey worthwhile. if we all start off perfect, where is the challenge ?
 
I'd throw myself at my second hobby - running.

(My enthusiasm for photography waxes and wanes from week to week, month to month - sometimes I cannot shoot enough, other times it might be weeks when I don't pick up a camera. I have to be in the right frame of mind for photography, relaxed and not stressed out. Now running is almost the reverse as I find that it is a great stress buster for me.)
 
So you suck at making pictures . . . you are now in a large, and friendly, group of us who have no delusions or pretense about our talents.

I also suck at gardening and really suck at cooking, but I love doing them as much as I love sucking at making pictures.

Life is too too short to fret about silly things like this. :D
 
Just file it under bad decision, next morning will be different...

Seriously, sign up for a photography workshop and get professional input, sometimes it's just a seemingly minor adjustment from "suck" to "not too bad at all". Keep shootin' and get rid of more bags ;)

... and for me it would be oil painting, impasto, alla prima, kind of the M3 style of painting :D.
 
I fall into the group that already sucks...

I've always wanted to try my hand at painting, but I doubt I'd be any better at that than photography.
 
It is just a hobby for me, I may well suck at it, but it does not bother me too much. With more time on my hands, and no photography, I'd play around more with computers probably. The interesting/niche ones, not PC/Mac/iPad/Android etc.
 
Cooking, drawing, woodworking, writing, maybe collage, work with found objects, maybe explore the different mediums of painting..
 
Pretty confident my writing would benefit from that, I gotta pour out those creative juices somewhere and while there's a complete novel waiting, I've hardly gotten past a few chapters, a lot of studying on cultural and historical aspects of the novel's setting, and the psychological outline of main characters.

Suppose I'd make progress if I didn't spend so much time fiddling camera's and browsing the internet...:eek:
 
Birding probably..

On first glance, birding seems to be about watching birds and spending time in the field studying their behaviour..

But don't forget that there's that tremendously rewarding other aspect to it; collecting binoculars and scopes. Start with FSU binos, and then suffer GAS for Zeiss or Leica glass. Endless pondering about which one to get, about MTF curves, about that Zeiss character versus Leica glow.. sounds familiar doesn't it?
 
John Bragg said:
It is better to start off not very good and improve steadily from there. Whilst I agree that natural aptitude is good, the capacity for continued improvement makes the journey worthwhile. if we all start off perfect, where is the challenge ?
Click to expand...

Well of course, and how far one goes or how much money one sinks into a hobby is all over the map.

Lets take mountain biking for instance. When I moved to the town I live in now, I already had a decent bike, lightweight, well tuned, etc. and I enjoyed riding it in the sense that I still do which is some nice winding single track through groves of trees in wilderness and certainly as transportation in the small mountain town that I live. But when it came to doing some of the more technical rides that my friends often do it was just not my cup of tea to constantly try to nuance my way through things like "The Rock Garden" or over a terraced set of roots called "Stumped".

After two years of taking my lumps and bumps such as a cracked helmet, a broken elbow or a jammed toe that gave me my now very painful bone spur, I knew I was not going to get any better without exposing my self to what I felt was too much risk of losing the ability of doing the other things I love to do. So while my friends have went on to buy high tech new full suspension bikes costing 3-5K, I am still riding my circa 1996 hardtail and I am fine with it...

No one starts off perfect and some journeys take longer than others such as in the case for snowboarding for me when I have neighbors and friends who have won Olympic medals at it, it took me about 10 years to get to an expert level.

But photography is very different for me, it all started at an early age and by age 11, I knew it would be my life, my job and certainly my calling, so I more than stuck with it, I made damn good and sure I excelled at it very early on before I poured tons of money and time into it. That is why if I could no longer enjoy the freedoms I currently have in doing it as my job, I would not even do it as a hobby, it would be too hard to see it be reduced to that at this point in my life...

We are indeed all very different....
 
I've never thought I was a particularly good photographer -- a certain level of technical competence, yes. Inspired, creative, or interesting as a shooter, I suspect definitely not. So it wouldn't affect my enjoyment of it as a hobby. I also play guitar, and do martial arts. As with photography, I'm competent but not outstanding at both. That's enough for me to still get lots of pleasure out of all three.

With photography, much of the pleasure is with participating quietly in the world in an active way. When I'm walking for pleasure, with a camera, I'm attending to the world around me. Aware of the appearance of things, enjoying the light, shapes, and so on. Even if I didn't show the photographs to other people (and I mostly don't), the process would still be pleasurable.

Matt
 
i have returned to whitetail deer hunting, but that is not year-around.
i have taken up bushcrafting, and am sufficiently into it to call it a passion, fully the equal of photography.
one records my world, heart, mind and soul; the other immerses me in the physical world.
 
I wake up every morning knowing I suck.

That is why this is a "hobby" and not my profession.

-and that is why I keep doing it! One morning, I may just get my worm.
 
Not sure what else I would do. I had other hobbies in the past that I had trouble working into my day-to-day life. I will say that I think photography is a hobby that you suck at 99% of the time but you keep at it for the 1% of the time you don't (or is it 0.1%?).
 
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