Practice

I have to shoot something everyday now. I started running and it has felt really good, my head feels clearer, I sleep better, and I have more energy throughout the day.  I wondered, if my body feels better after daily exercise what will my left eye do after exercise? How does a photographer practice though? We don't have scales and arpeggios to run through every day, there are no free-throws for us to shoot... it seems like everything in photography is just  performance- without practice-  then I read about Josef Koudelka's method.  Koudelka, my current favorite, shoots 3 rolls of film everyday just to keep his eye in constant use, he's not reporting, he's not trying to make tremendous pictures, he is just running through film everyday for the sake of working on composition.  Composition is the most important aspect of being a photographer in my opinion, everyone understands what emotion looks like and with enough practice and watching you can learn to freeze those emotional moments, but it takes a photographer, a visual architect, to notice (SEE) the visual harmony the world offers and with that harmony a subject's character and emotion can be emphasized. So composition/geometry- that's what I am practicing everyday. Shooting one frame and moving on to the next thing that grabs my attention for 30 minutes everyday in a different location everyday, not looking at the pictures until I get home and no thinking at all during the shooting, just fire here, fire there for 30 minutes or till the environment is exhausted, then dig deeper to find something missed. The goal is to know your lens (fixed focal length) like your own eye and hit the target every time, no cropping.  Shooting can a thrill when you attack it with the intensity of a coke-addict.