Howdy good folks! Trust January hasn’t met you in penury.

Oh, I like the sound of that! ‘January and penury.’ “ Save ye for the days to come lest reproach come upon thee like penury in January.” It’s a corny rhyme but I don’t care. It came in the moment, a gift from the Muse. I expect the expression to start making the rounds around pulpits and podiums soon. Remember you heard it first from moi!

Right.

Remember my new-found love for photography? How I was going to be the baddest street photographer that ever liveth? I wrote about it in this post here. Well, I have surprised myself on how serious myself seem to be.

So serious that myself and a fellow shutterbug have found ourselves kneeling down on Third Mainland Bridge at 11 pm hunting trailing lights.

And on the Marina waterfront too. 

Small time dem go talk say mammy water kill some people.

 

A word of advice for anyone interested in night photography in Lagos at wee hours. Have protection. Go with someone. Befriend the police patrol near the scene of interest, or seek the ‘landlords’ of the area and pay obeisance. There is wildlife in Gidi. And by that I don’t mean giraffes and impalas. I’m talking about bipeds with an eye for lucre. Respect the rules of the city.

And fellas, if you think you have it rough, you need to go to the Marina pedestrian bridge and underpass at 12 midnight. Your countrymen live there. People have mosquito nets strung up and are sleeping soundly. No doubt some of these people may be drug addicts, miscreants and reprobates. But consider that 21 million of your countrymen want to work but can’t find work. And 18 million are underemployed. 

Be thankful. Not everyone suffering sinned.  

On to the good news! I’m taking some decent pictures. Portraits, cityscapes and city people. They are not Amadi-Obi, TY Bello or Nat Geo-esque, but I’m making progress. And that’s important. To make progress, whether by inches, yards or miles.

I have renewed respect for the big names in photography and indeed experts in any field. Renewed respect for the amount of time, commitment and resources they put into honing their craft.

For me to have one good shot, I must have taken about twenty. It was testing. Who get that kain time? Especially when this was just a hobby for me. A few times I was tempted to insult the mother of my camera and the father of my tripod. But since I was the closest person they had to a parent, I restrained myself. Own goals are not my thing.  

But I continued wracking my brain for the best location, the best time, the best composition, the best aperture, the best emotion.

That’s the thing about passion. When you have a passion for something, you want to be great at it. You want to get better and better. You begin to see things in your mind. See what others don’t see (which, by the way, is how derangement starts. You should watch A Beautiful Mind. Just saying). 

But you get the idea. Passion pushes you out of your comfort zone. In the end, it is often profitable and fulfilling.

And stay the course. No good thing happens without stick-to-it-iveness.

Right! Special shout-out to my daughters. I’ve been practicing a lot with them.  I’m sure they find me exasperating at times as the picture below shows. But everyone can’t pick their dad. So they should deal with it.

PS: I need to get to grips with photo editing software. I hear Adobe Lightroom is the go-to software for photographers. But Adobe won’t sell it to payment cards from Nigeria! Some yada yada about software not being available in my country. I get it. I’m from the backwaters of the planet, where we are not supposed to have any intelligent or creative thought. Their loss. Bought Affinity Pro instead. Too complicated to use. Or maybe it’s a user problem?  Whatever, I need to learn how to edit photos! Any teachers out there?