Curiosity is key to photography. It’s what drives us to get outside and explore, discover, learn—and then photograph what we’ve found and learned so that we can share it with the world. And there’s no such thing as being too curious! I think it’s safe to say that we can throw out that old saying, “curiosity killed the cat.” So long as we’re being smart and practicing art safely, we can’t be too curious.

So that begs the question, if curiosity is essential to photography, then how do we develop more curiosity? The only way I know is to explore everything you can think to explore. This means not only going out into the world and visiting places you’ve never been, or turning down those back roads you’ve always wondered about, but also other forms of exploration.

You see, it’s not always possible to get out into the world—but we can still explore it from the comfort of our sofas. Explore by reading books on subjects that interest you, photography related or not. You may discover that some of these things are things that you might like to photograph. For instance, a book about gemology or rocks and minerals might turn into a photographic expedition to capture images of beautiful rock...

Photographers are, by nature, perfectionists. It’s ingrained into us to be highly conscious of every last little detail because sometimes, those details can make or break a photograph. So we struggle and we cause ourselves a lot of stress trying to make sure that every last little detail within an image is exactly how we want it to be. In the end, we end up with these scientifically perfect images in which the exposure is spot on, the focus is tack sharp, the colors are ideally rendered — you get the point. It goes so far that we spend hundreds, often thousands of dollars on gear and software that will help us chase that perfect photograph.

All of this leads me to my next thought, which is this: At what point do all of these details start to bog us down? Is it possible that we sometimes reach a point where we are so worried about focus, color, exposure and all of the rest of those pesky details that the worry itself starts to get in the way of the art? To my mind, there has to come a time where we must step back from the perfectionism, if only by a little bit. Perhaps it is beneficial to stop fretting over the fact that you accidentally stopped the aperture down just one stop too low or that you used an ISO setting just a hair higher than you might have liked...