My father came up to me one day, with an odd statue of Don Quijote made out of nails and screws and other odd pieces and decided to get it for me.
I was surprised of getting such an odd gift in for no particular reason, but just as I was about to leave I asked him why he thought it was a good gift for me. To which he replied:
“It’s so you’ll remember to never stop chasing windmills”
I was puzzled, but at that time I didn’t think much more about it. But given some recent events in my personal and professional life, I started to understand what he really meant.
I’m a child at heart, as most people are, eager to obtain and toy with new things, feelings, places. To discover and experience as many things as possible. One of the things that recently made me happy was the new camera I bought, which surprised me with it’s incredibly quality right on the first shots.
But it wasn’t until I took off it’s “training wheels” that reality hit me. It wasn’t me who was adjusting the settings, make them just right so the shot would come out great. The camera did that for me. And taking a picture without those assistants isn’t as easy as it sounds, but I’m slowly grasping it, and applying what I’ve learned from friends and relatives.
How long I will use this camera is anybody’s guess, but in the same way that I use a computer and never get tired of it, I wonder if it’s really possible to get tired of photography? Perhaps one day I’ll get tired of the device itself, or feel tempted to obtain a newer model with new things, most of which I’ll never use.
But I don’t think I’ll ever lose that “want to discover”, whether it’s in my photography, my code, my games, my life, I’ll always thrive to find and chase new windmills.