You get to choose

When a good photo is all you want, the world is your oyster. You can do anything you want. You can even play games like telling yourself “This month I’ll concentrate on taking photos of honeybees.” You can go stroll in your garden and come back with a bagful of photos of honeybees. All very nice looking, with flowers in glowing colours in the background.

It’s spring, and you can play more games. “Now I want photos of bees with filled pollen baskets,” you say, knowing that honey bees, like all animals, need proteins to grow big and strong. So you go for other long strolls in gardens, and you come back with photos of honey bees collecting pollen from flowers in the panniers that hang by their legs. You think that’s the bee’s knees? No.

You can tell yourself “I need a good photo of a honeybee without a flower in the background.” You can do it. Find a sweet shop in a clean village in the countryside, and you’ll see bees swarming over the open rosogollas. Spend an hour or two and you will have another bagful of interesting photos. Nothing to it. So is there never a problem? There is. If you say “I want a good photo of a honeybee, but I’ll spend only a couple of minutes in this garden,” then you are setting yourself up for a hard time. You need to up your game so that every photo counts. That’s hard, and I’m not there yet.