Over the last 5 days, I've managed to clock 16 hours of active shooting time at famous landmarks and locales all around the Bay Area and countless more hours uploading and reviewing over 800 shots. Amidst all this work, I've actually come to an important epiphany that is going to be a gamechanger for this project. To date, I've only been tracking actual shooting time. The flaw in this methodology is that shooting pictures is only one part of becoming a good photographer - previewing images on a teeny screen in bright daylight doesn't reveal imperfections readily and it isn't until I get them onto a big screen that these errors are glaring. The majority of my active learning time actually occurs when I'm reviewing the photos I've taken and evaluate how they could be improved for next time.
The perfect example from this weekend was trying to correct for the classic foggy haze that is San Francisco weather - though I experimented while actively taking pictures with different apertures and shutter speeds, the pictures still came out on variations of hazy with flat colors once up on a bigger screen and even digitally manipulating them didn't always yield pleasing results. I then did what I do best - search the Internet for some answers. I spent a solid hour reading about camera filters and how they work to manipulate light and colors in less than ideal weather conditions. I definitely gained more in an hour of academic reading than I would have after another hour of blind experimentation adjusting camera settings.
So, all that being said, I'm changing the rules! I'm now going to start counting hours I spend reading about photography and reviewing photos - it's a much more accurate documentation of my learning experience... and there is the added side benefit of getting to 10,000 hours much more realistically attainable.