This is an interesting thread to me as it reminds me of what I realized on one of the first workshops I attended. I was sitting in a room and we had all been asked to show 10 of our images taken on the trip. On the first day of the workshop we had said a little bit about ourselves and many of the people in the workshop had been taking images for 20 years or so. I was maybe two years into photography and I thought, "wow, all these people must be really good photographers as they've been at it so long." I was almost shocked when I saw the photographs of some of these long-time photographers as they looked to me like something a "Happy Snapper" would take. It was then that I realized it's not really about how long you've been taking photographs, although length of time can matter, it's about how much you've taken in and mentally processed in the time you've been photographing. Later I noted to myself that the problem for that group of people I was with is that some of them had been taking, over the course of that 20 or so years, the same photograph they took that first year they were learning...they never got beyond that first year. Someone else here said that "if there's no shot, there's no shot" and often that is the case, but not always. Sometimes we have to look really hard for the shot and maybe we'll see something that no one else saw. Getting to that "next level" takes time, patient, a desire to learn and grow in photography, and the willingness to take the hard road of getting to know everything you can about the craft.
