Initial Disappointment

I have found that after a trip, it's not uncommon to be very disappointed in the images made. If this happens often enough, you start to question your skills and whether it's worth persisting. Not uncommonly this can lead to periods of weeks, months or even years without photographing.

It's well worth while over several months going back to the images made from the disapointing trip and seeing if there is something there after all to work with. It seems to me that discovering the good images can be a gradual process. Partly this is an issue of buiding false hopes but partly it's that the raw file like the negative or even the contact sheet shows so little of the possibilities of an image that it isn't always recognized as being worth while. This is especially true from a multi day trip in which hundreds of images were taken and the excitement of a specific image and it's potential is forgotten amongst so many other images so that when looking at the 'proofs', the potential is missed.

My initial reaction to coming home from Vancouver Island was that I got nothing worth while, and while it's still true that none of the images have that 'wow' factor, it is not accurate to say I 'got nothing'. Above are three more images from that trip and you have gradually seen me produce a series of images of at least some merit.