Dealing With Failure

I think it's a given that we are going to fail at times, in fact often, nay regularly. Failure is the norm - All great photographers shoot more lemons than prizes. Perhaps though we can have a look at the kind of failures we have and learn something from it.

There are technical failures - of focussing, exposure, camera steadiness, forgetting to reset the ISO back to normal after doing a basketball game, etc.

There are equipment failures - lenses that aren't sharp into the corners, or suffer barrel distortion or cameras with not enough pixels, too much noise, etc., etc..

There are compositional errors (I don't mean you didn't compose a great picture, I mean the simple errors like the tree out of someone's head, the white against white so shapes don't show, the overlap of things that would have been better almost overlapping but not quite, the fact of not considering that in black and white two obviously different things won't separate because it's their colour that separates them.

There are processing errors - whether it be poor technique in the darkroom or careless backups resulting in erasing a cf card you hadn't stored yet.

The above are mistakes - they shouldn't happen but they do - a good photographer minimizes them. There are also failures which simply happen because despite your best efforts, it just doesn't quite work. Perhaps it was worth trying, maybe you should have realized it wasn't going to work - but predicting the great images is extremely difficult and no photographer ever got it right even 10% of the time.

It can be rewarding to look at the proofs of some of the great photographers - occasionally you see them published in magazines - some of their 'other shots' the ones that didn't become famous, are real dogs. Oh, they were properly exposed and focused and well developed, but you wouldn't thank them for a print.

The other day I had an assignment to photograph a particularly ugly new building for the local college. I took 177 images and from those selected about 8 to show them - but of course that wasn't good enough - they wanted to see all my images - even though I had selected the ones that were clearly the best. But they want to make their own choices. I didn't like the idea of them seeing all the images and heaven forbid they should select one of the ones that I was least pleased with.

I was out shooting at Jura canyon with a friend. I noted at the time that he seemed overly optimistic about his depth of field and subsequently he called to say that none of the images had turned out - all of them lacked enough depth of field.

This is a fairly easy fix - I found a depth of field calculator for him (there are lots of them on the net) and it clearly showed that he couldn't do what he was trying to do - not with that lens, not at f11, and not from that position. This is the kind of mistake we all make once, but there isn't really any good reason to continue making it. There are too many other mistakes we can make instead to double up on the same one.

So:

Lesson 1) lean from your mistakes - do something so the same mistakes are unlikely.

Lesson 2) Accept that despite perfect technique and a 'good eye' you are going to take a lot more throw aways than keepers.

Next time I'm going to address the more difficult subject of how to handle the second kind of failures - is it possible to minimize the failures - does it even matter (if you can afford the film or cf cards?