It is no secret that I’ve been struggling with my photography ever since I made the switch to digital a year ago. I haven’t been happy with the results, nor with my own lack of enthusiasm. Somehow, the passion was gone, or at least suppressed.

Yesterday, we visited the Audubon sanctuary at Corkscrew about an hour outside of Naples, Florida. This is an amazing swamp, through which they have built a 2.5 mile long nature boardwalk that takes you through some of the lushest landscape imaginable. I took a few shots but there was such a choking greenery that all I could see was a mass of flora…very uninteresting for a “street” photographer.

About halfway through, I got bored of dawdling through at a snail’s pace with our friends, and picked up the pace, winding up at the main pavilion balcony about an hour ahead of their return. As I sat there schwitzing from my brisk walk, I thought about how lousy my work had become and why. I realized that in moving to the new digital medium, I had been trying to work up to its potential rather than within my own limitations.

Digital offers so much that it is easy to get wrapped up in the technology and the opportunity rather than stay true to what you can and like to do. For example, digital offers you the ability to shoot in B&W or color, virtually from one shot to the next. And, in order to get the best possible rendition, one is encouraged to shoot in RAW format (color) and then simply convert to B&W later in Photoshop, if desired. Now, many photographers do this very well and have little difficulty in moving seamlessly from one to the other. But not me. Growing up with film, I learned to see in one or the other, and it takes me ages to make the transition, if at all. I remember someone commenting that my color images looked like “black and white…in color”….and he was right. I’ve never mastered color.  I like it for tourist and travel shots, but not for what I consider more personally interesting work.

So as I sat there on the balcony, I decided to break with conventional wisdom and just go back to what I always liked to do. I shifted the M8.2 into B&W mode even though it now only produces lower quality jpegs, and started to just look at what was around me. And I was back! In an hour, my heart was pumping with excitement at all the new discoveries right in front of my face. Here are a few: