By Wayne Cosshall

Amid the distractions of day-to-day life, sometimes we forget what a particularly wonderful pastime or career photography can be. Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves why photography is so perfect.

First and foremost, photography combines so many facets of personal development into one interlocking area of activity.

Photography is a balanced mix of left and right-brained activity. Left-brained work is logical, methodical and sequential. Working with camera technology, setting up complex shots, consciously exploring a photographic space, and planning a shoot are all left-brained activities. So are certain types of technical photography, such as macro or scientific photography.

Right-brained activity is holistic, intuitive and random. It is the creative side of photography that allows you to lose all sense of time. Later, when you discover 90 great shots on your memory card, you may not recall exactly how they got there. You may not remember precisely what you did while lost “in the zone,” just you and your camera melded into a unified whole. Right-brained thinking also enables us to solve photographic problems in some wonderfully “out-there” ways.

A key aim of personal development is to build one’s capacity for both left- and right-brain thinking. Most people are inherently stronger in one type than the other, so it’s beneficial to seek more balance. Imagine how powerful it would be if you were equally good in both, and could make a choice about how you would approach different situations. Even better would be the ability to be left- and right-brained simultaneously. You could almost function like two different, normal people in a single, body/mind/soul package. How powerful would that be?

Photography gives us the opportunity to become that-or to at least make progress towards that goal.

Flexibility is another reason photography is perfect. You can shoot stunning landscapes, grimy urban scenes, tabletop macros, astrophotography, microphotography, portraits, or history-making news and events. And the list goes on and on.

You can set up an incense stick and shoot the smoke rising from it, lie on the ground and shoot your carpet as if it were a landscape, shoot portraits one tiny part of the face at a time, experiment with long time exposures, or shoot abstract blurs. No matter what type of gear you have, you never lack something to shoot.

We often forget that photography is much more about the photographer than the type of gear used. In the hands of a photographer who understands its capabilities, even a compact point-and-shoot camera can take great shots, including stunning macro shots.

Even so, photography is wonderful partly because of the rich variety of gear from which to choose. Digital SLRs have become immensely popular for many types of photography because you can quickly and easily check whether or not you got the shot you had in mind.

But you don’t have to use digital equipment if you don’t want to. You can shoot film, use a large-format camera, use homemade pinholes for lenses, capture panoramas, and even build your own cameras and accessories. Photography offers so many possibilities that it’s impossible to mention them all here.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to spend a good chunk of your time shooting images, try not to become complacent. Let’s try to always remember how remarkable photography can be.