There is a popular notion that says that if you want to master something you need to practice it for 10,000 hours. After thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice your brain becomes trained to perform a skill. It becomes more efficient and can perform it better.
There is no doubt truth to this. (“Practice makes perfect.”) But it’s not entirely accurate. There may be some things that you can master almost immediately and other things that may still elude you after 20,000 hours.
The operative term is “deliberate practice” which requires focus and focus is the act of giving all your attention to something. Deliberately practicing something takes deliberate practice. That’s how we get good.
Becoming a good photographer requires plenty of deliberative practice and many of us are happy to oblige. It’s a no brainer to enjoy practicing something that’s fun, gives immediate feedback and hits you with a jolt of dopamine when you get it right.
Deliberately practicing taking photos and being aware of just how you are doing it can have immediate results, multiple results. It can result in a wonderful collection of photos, increase your camera skills and enlarge your awareness. You can carry these skills and awareness to your next set of photos if you do it again within a reasonable amount of time. Skills and awareness are like batteries, they lose their power over time if they aren’t recharged.
Everyone can take a good photo and everyone probably can nail a great photo, sometimes, too. What differentiates the beginner from the skilled photographer (the one who’s played 1000s of hours taking photos) is consistency. The skilled photographer has a good (or great) body of work, not just an assortment of good individual photos and the next time she’s out shooting her photos will be better than the last time.