P for patience; P for photography

I'm not a photographer. I get lucky sometimes. On Instagram, i often put up pictures which are liked more for their one-word captions than the actual photography invested in them. On top of that, my ASUS Zenfone 5 sucks. In my defence, the essence of photography is distilled to such a level that the question "who isn't a photographer anymore?" rings true to our generation. Everybody clicks and shares. The whole idea of capturing a moment is to share sooner or later. And it's never been truer than now. We've come a long way from getting clicked by professional photographers in a dingy studio to owning a camera to double-clicking a mouse to clicking round the clock on our phones. Small surprise why there were more photographs clicked in the last decade than in the last century. Very few of them would make Henri Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams proud though. But then the bigger question looms: how many of us are aiming to be them? They saw photography as an art form. A majority of us see it as an attempt to document our life; from the mundanest of things like cafeteria food to the awesomest like a mountain dew. Whatever space art gets to fit in these circumstances is accidental. Photoshop and Illustrator leave little scope. On the other hand, a good photographer shall adhere to photography through incredible amount of patience; something our generation seems to lack. The finest photographs appear flawless but they occurred because the person behind the lens was willing to wait longer. Like one rainy evening, i saw Ashish Rane (the then photography editor of mid-day) did at the entrance of the office building. He was standing with his camera, in his hands, facing the sky. It was obvious he was waiting to capture a lightning. I don't know for how long he was waiting or how much longer he waited after i said bye to him but i know one thing for sure: an amazing sky picture was printed in the paper the next day.