Monday, October 22, 2007

Compromises and Perfection

Life is full of them, photography too. We compromise on camera equipment - what we'd like vs. what we can afford or even size and weight - sure I'd like to use medium format digital, but they don't make the equivalent of a 70-200 lens, never mind a 17-40 or 24-105. I'd lose my 90 Ts-e and I'd need a sherpa for hauling it around if it were available.

We compromise in making compositions - we frame in the strongest way possible - not necessarily the perfect way - as we compromise on what is included - more of this comes with more of that, the latter being something I didn't want in the picture - so just where to I call it quits?

When recording the image, I'd ideally like to use multi row stitching, but that would slow me down and I'd have less time to find better pictures - so I compromise and use either single images or at most a single row for stitching.

I guess the point of this rant is that if we wait for things to be perfect, we are on a 'fools' errand' and could be missing some good images while waiting for perfection. Further, previsualization not withstanding, we can't know everything about an image before we work on it and giving ourselves a series of images, each as good as we can make it under the circumstances, instead of waiting for a single image which we think is perfect (but might not turn out to be) is a better strategy.

1 comment:

Mark said...

I know the more I work a subject, the more different aspects reveal themselves to me. So it is worth spending a little extra time with something other then the first gut feel. However, like your post suggests, how much time is too much? Will we always be waiting for some aspect or composition to be discovered? It is impossible to set a stop watch for when to move on. I suppose we just have to also go with our gut feel on when to quit!