I tried to learn magic as a kid. I think I got as far as getting my dad to pretend to be impressed as I bungled some novice slight of hand.
I did learn eventually how to do some kinds of photographic magic. My whole life I'd seen those images of waterfalls and flowing water that were long exposures, where the water turned into beautiful silken threads over rock (and equally the shots taken with fast shutters that caught droplets suspending in air).
So I read about how it was done and set out one day to take some pictures at a small creek in Swarthmore to test it out. I got into a different mindset: you can’t hand-hold the camera if you want that image. You have to plan, you have to gear up a bit. I set up the first tripod I owned (I’ve since gotten a much better one), fiddled with the settings, took shots. Fiddled again, realized I had to put on some filters to make it darker (another thing I’d just bought at the time). Then I realized you couldn’t see to focus when the filters were on. Then I realized I had about fifteen minutes left before the sun went over the ridgeline on the west.
And I got the shot finally, the current through the pool leading visually in a hook back to the small waterfall, the last light of afternoon still catching on the wet rock. It felt like a successful magic trick. Yes, they’re cliches, and at some point, you really want to figure out how to do it better—to find an angle, to include some distinctive part of the landscape, to get human figures in it, to really work the light, to avoid the spectacular waterfalls in favor of the little creeks and tumbles. But it was one of those tricks that I’m still not tired of, and it’s kind of a gateway drug—it opens up a whole universe of long exposures: those photos of star trails, long exposures of moving clouds and storms, shots of urban landscapes where the people turn into ghosts or disappear entirely, and so on.