For every twist, a turn - a photo on Flickriver

Alright, this post is inspired by, but not just for, Fred, who asked me to post one of my less-than-successful pinhole images. It did not take me much digging at all to find one.

I really should have done something like this much sooner. Several years ago I attended a conference here in Portland by the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, or RMSP, during which I heard a lecture by Craig Tanner on the Myth of Talent. It was a very good presentation, and an argument that has shaped how I have looked at photography ever since. One of the things I remember best about that lecture though was his slide presentation. Craig has done some amazing landscape work, some of which he showed. At one point in the presentation though he switched from showing his best work, to showing several slides of utter crud that he had taken early in his career. I actually remember more of those images than I do of the good ones, it made that strong of an impression.

Here is a truth about photographers: None of them pick up a camera and start making brilliant images right out of the gate. Check out Ansel Adams' early stuff when he was a teenager hiking Yosemite and shooting with a Brownie camera to see a good example of this.

I would also dare to say that every photographer, regardless of skill level, produces more "failures" than "successes". The best photographers certainly tend to have a better rate of success, but more often than not, they have just gotten much better about the editing out of the weaker images. You only see a professional's best in other words. An amateur tends to show you everything.

But let us talk a bit about failure, because I want to make another long post about this in the near future, and I can help set the stage for that now. Failure is a poor choice of words in my opinion. So is calling a photo "bad". There are no bad photos, just bad uses of them. It does not matter how messed up a picture is, if one thinks hard enough they can find a good use for it. Trust me, I have seen this put into practice, at times amazingly so.

And I do not believe a photo fails, a photographer can fail, he or she is human and perfectly capable of doing so, but a photo is just a photo. What I mean to say is, it is up to the photographer to appropriately use a picture, or the experience of taking that picture. Nothing is a waste of time if you learn and grow from the experience of doing it. This is important. My successes as a photographer are because of my failures. Without those failings, and the experience I gleaned from them, the trial and error, guess and check, I would never have been able to accomplish the images I have. You have to fail to succeed.

I hope this is making some sense, I am having to use a lot of words that I do not care to use, such as: failure, success, bad, good, etc. But that I shall address in my next post.

Ok, so on to this photo. Well it fails in a few ways. First, the composition is crooked, and frankly very uninteresting. It does very little to emphasize the subject matter. In fact I am sure most of you cannot even guess what the subject of this photo is. Go ahead, I shall give you a moment to try.

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The subject of this photo is the expanse of water in the foreground. That's right, that mostly black body of water. While i was standing here the gold light from the far hills was mixing with the deep blue of the water and I wanted to try a long pinhole exposure of how that looked. I was curious to see how the blue and gold blended.

Not very well apparently.

Plus my horizon is crooked. And there is a giant blob of shadow on the right. The supposed subject of the far, sunlit hills is not strong enough to usurp this photo and carry it.

So I am left with this. It is not horrible, but nor is it great. At the risk of confusing you and the hopes of underscoring the argument I have begun to make here and will finish later, I will point out that I have not called this photo a failure. Nor do I consider it one. Certainly not one of my better pieces, but a necessary step along the way. It was practice (isn't everything) and I have gained experience from this, particularly for the next time I am in a similar situation.

The funny thing is, this photo does succeed in a very important way. It reminds me of that sunny afternoon, and how it felt to stand on the edge of this lake and see the hills be set afire with the last afternoon light. The brisk wind blowing across the lake and make the surface of the water choppy so that the blue and gold intermingled in the way that initially caught my attention. This photo takes me back to that moment quite effectively.

Anyway, some food for thought though regarding success and failure I hope. And I also hope that those of you who follow my stream and have an overinflated opinion of just how well I do this whole pinhole thing realize that all of us take "bad" pictures, usually more often than not. ;-)

By the way, a few pinhole images from the same lake that I thought turned out a bit better.

Taken on: February 4, 2009

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Camera: Zero Image 6x9 pinhole, f/250.0, 15 sec (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Zero Image 6x9 pinhole
Aperture:	f/250.0
Exposure Time:	15
Exposure Program:	Manual
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 7.0
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