Message from @ Bruce Gilling
...few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it."
Does that sound like you? Edward Weston proposes a cure in his next paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Weston
"...the task can be made immeasurably easier by selecting the simplest possible equipment and procedures and staying with them. Learning to see in terms of the field of one lens, the scale of one film and one paper, will accomplish a good deal more than gathering a smattering of knowledge about several sets of tools."
The worst thing done by people who are not masters is try to use more than one lens at a time. There were too many confusing variables for most people to grasp lucidly back in in the 1950s and 1960s, long before zoom lenses or color film became common. Today, not only do we have way too many lenses and doo-dads, we have added innumerable new variables to distract our attention even from shot to shot. I doubt that few people today will ever be able to rise above today's sea of noise to accomplish good photos, except by random chance.
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