Ira Glass, from This American Life, talks about working on becoming a professional, and keeping at what you do for years until you’ve learned to do it well.

This, really, is why I started this blog – primarily the photo portion of it. I have no dreams of being a professional blogger or writer – that’s not me – but I do want to hone my skills as a photographer. I realized once I got my first DSLR that I was going to need to go through a few thousand frames before I really got past being a vacation-snapshot photographer and got more into the photojournalist or fine art photographer category. Yes, I know. A few thousand. Foolish. I’m maybe ¹⁄₂ way there, in my personal estimate, and I’ve got well over 14,000 images in my Aperture library. We’re now talking about tens of thousands of images before I get where I want to be.

In other news, looking back, I have come a long way. I started this blog (for the picture of the day part) on April 17, 2005 and I must say, it’s been a long trip. I hope everyone else can see the improvement that I can see in the quality of the pictures I’m taking.

I think the next thing I need to master is off camera flash.