Back in 1993, Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell starred in Groundhog Day. It was a story where a weatherman repeatedly found himself living the same day.

He is learning from his mistakes and even intentionally makes terrible choices due to his bad attitude.

While I would love to wake up each day looking like I did in college, that just isn’t happening.

Here I am with my Nikon FM2 and the Nikkor 80-200mm ƒ/4. The ƒ/2.8 would come later.

The lesson of Groundhog Day was elementary; you don’t get 2nd chance, so do your best to make your actions positive. You reap what you sow, as the saying goes.

“Moore’s law” is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[note 1] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. – Wikipedia

From 1975 until a couple of years, this still holds pretty true. Moore’s law had an incredible impact on the rest of society and particularly on photography.

In the last 14 months, Sony has introduced 11+ top-end mirrorless cameras. A few years ago, we were talking about short-duration flash to stop objects, and now we are talking about High-Speed Sync as a way to stop action using strobes.

photo by Robin Rayne Nelson

Education

How much have you spent on gear the last few years, and then how much have you spent on education? Most of us would benefit by spending more on education than on equipment.

Here are some great educational opportunities I recommend, for example:

• ASMP Atlanta – The Business of Photography Workshop
• Hands-on Multimedia Workshop – Coffee Farmers in Chiapas, Mexico
• Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar
• For Missions Photography YWAM School of Photography 1

photo by Robin Rayne Nelson

I believe the best way to learn is by doing and having someone with you teaching you as you are doing. The workshops I lead are about hands-on experience and the instructors speaking about your project as you work on it. Bill Murray’s character Phil in the movie Groundhog Day used the repeat of a day as a workshop where he learned from his mistakes. Since Groundhog Day movie is fictional, we have to look for other ways to learn how to make the best choices so we can stop the insanity of not growing but just feeling miserable. I would love to work with you and help you develop some new skills to help you be better prepared and anticipate what clients need. Give me a call or write to me so I can save a spot for you this January in Chiapas, Mexico.