Failures Beyond Our Control

OK, so last time I emphasized the failures that are technical or at least subject to some fairly simple do's and don'ts. What about the bigger frustration of you go out for a shoot, you do your best, you don't make any mistakes, yet what you come home with is crap?

Perhaps this hasn't happened to you but over the years it sure has happened to me - though it happens less often than it used to so perhaps I can offer some useful thoughts.

The first thing is that photographic excursions do sometimes result in crap. If you are photographing 2 or 3 times a month, the occaional complete failure isn't a big deal - if you only get out 5 times a year, you 'need' every trip to be successful - this is probably unrealistic, so if you are frustrated it may simply be that you are giving yourself too few opportunities.

The second problem is that sometimes we really force it - we're desperate to get out and photograph, yet perhaps we're tired, stressed, distracted and definitely not inspired. We go 'cruzen fer snaps' in the vain hope that inspiration will strike somewhere down the backroads. Without a specific project or destination in mind, the odds of success are not great and it is a recipe for frustration. Of course, even knowing that nothing has inspired us, we take out our cameras at every hint of an opportunity and ignoring all the reasons the pictures won't be great, blast away, or spend hours lining up a basically mediocre shot. Is is a surprise that when we review the proof sheets (digital or real), we are disappointed?

The solution here is either to only photograph at interesting places or to give yourself an assignment - say a portfolio of 12 images of XXX, whatever XXX might be - it could be back alleys, garbage cans, insects, cutlery, 11 year olds, hockey or whatever. Having given yourself an assignment, the ojbect is to photogrpah the subject the best way possible, not to create a 'great work of art' and I think it takes some of the pressure off.

What about the times that the subject matter is interesting, something you care about, even get excited about, but the results are disappointing? It could be that the excitement itself is actually interfering with your discriminatory skills - it's so good how could you take a bad photograph of it - trust me, it's easy. Perhaps it's so good others have been there before you and the pressure is to say something different about it. Sometimes it's worth getting the 'classic' shot out of the way first, then work on saying something new.

One of the 'techniques' I have developed since going digital is to 'overkill' the site. Instead of finding the few good shots and spending an hour setting up the view camera, I will work the scene. Everytime I take a picture, I then see if I can't improve on it. You might ask why not find the best position first then take a single image, but that just hasn't worked for me. In the field I often have multiple choices which seem equally good and I'm simply not sure which is going to work better in the print. Once the images are in the computer however, it's obvious that most of the shots aren't nearly as good as one or two and I realize that had I quit after the first 'good' image, I would have come home with nothing.

This is not to say that we should shot gun away - I carry round my neck a 2X3 cutout in plastic that I use as a framing device. I check to see if there is a better position than my first one. That said, I'm surprised at how often the thing that grabbed me is only or best photographed from exactly the position at which I first saw the image. Uusally I will shoot from that first position and then move on to improve it if possible.

It pays to analyse the scene. What makes it worth photographing - is the colour, the shapes, the receding lines, is it age, texture, opposites, or balance. Is there a way to photograph it to take what caught your attention and emphasize it?

After all that, there is still a good chance that what you saw didn't translate into a great photograph - we need to be prepared to deal with disappointment. Some shoots just don't work out. Some things which look wonderful in the real world don't translate to photographs - you really 'had to be there'. So you remind yourself you enjoyed being there, and you move on.