A Day at Greenfield Lake: Learning Patience

I took a day and walked around Greenfield Lake. It is interesting that a beach town like Wilmington, North Carolina would also have a large, beautiful lake such as Greenfield Lake. I grabbed my small, cramped, over-used camera bag and went out for a little stroll. Little did I know that it was a little over 4 miles to walk completely around the lake. I didn't realize this until I hit mile marker 2...and which point it would have been the same for me to turn around as to keep going.

I snapped off two rolls of film and could have taken many more...except that I could only fit two rolls of film in my small camera bag. But I learned through my 3 hour hike around the lake to fully appreciate patience.

I found these two quacky animals about 30 minutes after I started hiking. Of course, to get the picture you see took me nearly 15 minutes of patience. I used a 135mm lens to get a tight fit, stood about 10 feet away, and waited. And waited. I wanted a picture where you could see both heads turned opposite directions. They would waddle, quack, and snort...but it was fifteen minutes before they finally posed like you see above. It was well worth the wait.

This picture was taken a few minutes later. I learned with this picture that sometimes people can be a problem. The bridge in the background was full of kids playing in brightly colored shirts. It was distracting. I wanted you to take notice of the moss hanging from the tree in the foreground. I purposely used a shallow depth of field so the background would be out of focus, but that just made the bright red and yellow shirts even more distracting. So, I waited until all the people were gone, ready to snap off a photo, and captured what you see above.

Cars or no cars? That was the question I asked myself as I waited for this photo. Cars can be so distracting. A person could look at the above photo and ask, "Am I supposed to pay attention to the color of the car? The make? Model?" So instead I waited patiently until the road was devoid of any vehicles and snapped this photo. It was worth the wait. The curvy road reminds me of home in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.

This final picture was more about detail than patience, but it took both. Sometimes patience is not really necessary in waiting for the perfect composition, but sometimes when trying to compose the shot. I mounted the camera to the tripod and easily set my exposure and aperture, but finding the right framing took some time.

I tried many variations before snapping off a few photos. Different heights, angles, and positions. I tried in front of the bush, and then behind. I focused on the water fountain, and then the bench. Took a lot of patience to find the right frame.

This is the moment when I add a little insert about the main difference between SLR and Digital SLR cameras. A bad difference. People with DSLRs tend to snap off hundreds of images a day. In fact, some people with a DSLR would have snapped off maybe a hundred pictures of just the composition above. Why? Because they can. I tried several variations before I found one I liked, and then snapped off about 5 photos. The difference? Do you really learn how to take good pictures by taking 1 good and 99 bad? It's like your hearing: if you force your ears to listen to something at a low level, you exercise your hearing. And if you force yourself to take 5 good photos, you exercise your photographic skills.