Excerpt from It's Not About the F-Stop: I was shooting this image for a calendar. The client was a bank in Vicenza, Italy. While I was shooting, an Italian photographer walked by and said, “It’s better down the road.” His name was Caesar Gerilometro and he was a good shooter. Years ago, I would never have followed his advice. I would have been trapped in my own little egoistic world and I could never admit that anything or anyone could help me or tell me what do. But I’m older now, and wiser, too. Wiser means you realize you are not as smart as you used to think you were. It also means you’ve lost the reasoning that made you feel it was cheating to be helped. So I went down the road. It was better. I stayed quite a while shooting, enjoying the play of light, water, and reflections. Four months later, I went back to Italy to show the client the work and called Caesar and showed it to him. He looked, and he said, “I never saw that before.” I told him I had gone exactly where he told me to go. “Yes,” he said, “but you shoot with telephoto eyes and I shoot with wide-angle eyes.” We will always be different. Don’t worry about being helped. Your pictures will be your pictures. They won’t suffer by your heeding advice. And they probably will look different than the other guys got anyway.
