You Started, What Next?

Sep 20, 2011 | Lifestyle

As part of my National Start Something journey, I plan to finish.

Beyond starting something, one of the greater challenges is maintaining once you have started. Sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in the newness and actually initiate something but what happens when it gets to the less sexy part. Many of us fade. In participating in the National Start Something Day campaign with Sanlam, this is a something that I have continuously been cognisance off; the risk of starting to procrastinate and fade. It is awesome that we Start Something, even better that we follow the full course.

As part of the NSSD campaign, there were a series of Word of Mouth sessions where different business leaders came to share their journey following their ‘starting something’. I was fortunate to catch one recently and was pleasantly surprised to find the speaker was an old varsity friend, Ben Nyaumwe, who built and runs, against many odds, the first Radisson hotel in South Africa – The Radisson Blu, Port Elizabeth. He shared his challenges and triumphs and was both inspiring and insightful.

Now, while the little photography course I started as part of NSSD pales when put next to the building of a hotel, the talk did re-excite me and refocus me on the fact that I did the photography to gain the skill as well as to have fun.

I finished my initial course, Fundamentals of Digital Photography some time back and will be going back in to do additional courses as the days, weeks and months unfold. The last part of the course was an early morning outing to the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens to apply the lessons we had learnt. These are some of my pics from that experience.

Fortunately enough time has passed for me to have forgotten how it felt, trying to set a camera up on tripod, with gloves on and the wind doing everything it could to disrupt (and trying to shoot leaves in windy conditions doesn’t work). What the experience has done for me is that I, firstly, often carry a camera with me when spending time with my family and I get some great (if I may say so) pictures documenting our lives and, secondly, I have started to take random pictures with hope of eventually publishing some. The other bonus is, because of my job, I get to review cameras, because of the knowledge. I have been shooting with a Sony Alpha 33 but will be posting some pics from my time with the Nikon D5100 soon.

The other thing on my photography bucket list – other than buying a bunch of lenses – is to go on a couple of photowalks. I started something, there is no finish … I keep going. What are you doing?