Take your camera off of Aperture priority and become a more active part of the picture-taking process.

You’re lazy. Sometimes I’m lazy. Sometimes this staff is lazy. Sometimes even the best professional photographers are lazy. There is a part of me that wishes autofocus were never developed (but the flip side to that is that my legal blindness would sort of hinder my shooting abilities). And I think that we, as photographers, have come to rely too heavily on technology as a crutch. The best of us have used it to create and capture moments no one else has. But we’ve used access, anticipation, and understanding of moments to help immortalize those scenes in photographs. Know that I’m not saying there is something wrong with the way you shoot: it’s to hammer in the fact that if you make things harder for yourself and give yourselves challenges, you can create better images. And what better way to do that than to simply set things back to the bare essentials.