Patience as the Whole Practice

Fifty years has not made me a better photographer in any of the ways the phrase usually means. I have not, with time, acquired techniques I did not have at thirty. I have not learned secrets the younger version of myself was not also told. The light at sixty-eight does what the light at twenty-eight did. The gear, by and large, is the same gear.

What fifty years has made me is more patient. I will sit on a rock for three hours where the younger man would have moved after thirty minutes. I will return to an overlook for the eleventh time when I would once have given up at the fourth. I will let a photograph fail to materialize without taking it personally.

These turn out, in the end, to be the same thing. Better photographer and more patient photographer are not adjacent qualities; they are the same quality. Whoever told you it was about talent, or about gear, or about being in the right place at the right time, was speaking of a different art.