Missed Opportunities.
Sometimes your junk photo's can be just as good as the best ones.
I make mistakes. There I said it. I fully admit to it.
But so what? Mistakes happen all of the time. And many times, mistakes have led to the the greatest creations ever. Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin which has led the saving countless lives over the decades. How? Because he was a slob.
Now I’m not going to declare that my mistakes will lead to something that profound, but imagine the ones that I have made and what they have lead to. My photo’s contain lots of mistakes. Bad framing, off angles, over or underexposed shots.
Unintentional subjects can lead to different narratives and then to new stories. Think of how many photo’s you take on a given day and how many of those that you keep and how many that you end up throwing out. Duplicates, blurred images, that darn finger of yours that just gets in the way of the frame. And then there are the ones that you just don’t like. Most photographers only keep a fraction of what they take on a given day or assignment. Some don’t keep any (guilty!).
Street photography definitely offers a myriad of opportunities to make these interesting little mistakes. It wasn’t until I decided to write this Substack that I really looked at some of these photos. I never deleted them because I thought that there would be some opportunity to use them at some point.
Most of the photographic mistakes that I have made were as a result of my unpreparedness with my camera. Whether the settings weren't just right or I just didn’t have it turned on, the mistakes I made could have easily been avoided. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not kicking myself for missing these photographic opportunities. Most of these were meant to be somewhat random, but they also weren’t meant to come out the way they did. But I’m OK with that. It will help me better appreciate the need to have my camera at the ready more often.
And don’t let me get started on the photo’s that I just completely missed. I certainly have no photographic evidence of those. Likely because I didn’t have my camera out or even with me. And I know we’ve all had moments like that.
So what does this little lesson teach me about mistakes in photography? Practice, practice, practice. Practice looking. Practice keeping your camera with you. Practice keeping it at the ready. Practice taking photo’s. Practice studying them, even the mistakes. Especially the mistakes.
Perhaps one day you’ll find your penicillin.
While Wayne Gretzky wasn't exactly talking about photography, the message is still relatable to what we do.
“You miss 100% of the the shots you don’t take.”
- Wayne Gretzky
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Really loved this. Sometimes the “mistakes” can have more impact than the perfectly taken picture. Great post.
Hi Brandon, Like this article. we all have missed opportunities. In fact, that's what my topic 'Un/Taken' is all about, the photo you did not take.
And of the photos we do take, some of them will be off, out-of-focus, blurry, under/overexposed, whatever. That's fine, 'cause we'll learn from them. I remember some sort of a photo bomb happening to me which initially ruined the portrait, but after all, now the photo hangs on the wall in my office.
Like that you've shared these junk photos in this post.
Cheers!