Trial and Error

Tonight I head downtown Tampa with some new LED lights that I bought a week ago. I want to see what they can do for me in a low-light and long exposure situation, so I hired a model from Craigslist and will see where the evening leads.

But I figured I should take some basic shots in advance so that I can have some idea of what to expect and possibly identify issues before they happen, so I went down to Lake Mirror in Lakeland last night just as the sun set.

It is excruciatingly difficult to do some of this stuff on your own and last night was a challenge to say the least. I must have looked a right idiot to anyone watching, as I was going back and forth to the camera, repeatedly taking what to all the world look like a set of strange selfies.

I was trying to train red and blue LED lights onto bubbles that I was blowing and trying to remotely catch the shot and after a number of desperately bad fails, managed to start to get something by the time the evening wore on. Hope you like some of these.

Driving home afterwards I began to mull over in my head the whole process of learning and in particular learning through trial and error.

It became obvious to me that in order to learn something new, you really have to leave your pride at the door because you are probably going to look like a fool for your first set of attempts. And while there weren’t all that many people around there were enough to give me a little bit of a complex. Making me feel self-conscious at my stumblings.

Getting through this feeling of being pathetic is truly essential and giving up should never be an option. Once you break through the barrier and begin to realize some of the learning, there is a sense of pride that follows that more than makes up for the initial feelings of awkwardness.

I think this is one of the reasons that children are such great learners … they don’t worry about looking foolish while they learn. Us older folk focus too much on what other people think and how we look in the process. And it really limits our ability to learn.

Success is never guaranteed and while that is indeed the end-goal of the learning process, sometimes it is the learning experience itself that turns out to be of greatest value.

How we draw from life’s experiences is an essential quality of self-growth and good and bad experiences contribute to the person we end up as. I used the phrase “end up” but in truth we should never “end up” until life’s light expires within us.

All of life should be a learning process and to those with an open heart and mind, it is.

Here’s hoping this coming weekend puts a learning experience your way and if it does, don’t be afraid to look a little goofy along the way. After all, Goofy was one of Walt Disney’s greatest creations.

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