"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." ~ George Bernard Shaw I am far from where I want to be as a photographer and I have far more failures than successes when it comes to my work. But with each failure, comes an opportunity to learn and grow. Many photographers believe that you should only post the best of your best work online, especially if you are attempting to attract new potential customers and to some degree this is a sensible statement. However, my sites are geared towards sharing my experience as a photographer and to pass along knowledge that might help someone else. To that end, I have several images that taunt me EVERY SINGLE TIME I look at them. I both love and hate this image - beautiful model and creative idea, but poorly executed! The lesson I learned from this image is to slow down! To create this image, you set up a camera on a tripod and take two pictures of the same scene; one picture with the model and frame in the scene and a second picture without the model and frame. However, before you take that second picture, make sure you have switched your camera to manual focus!!! On my first shot, I focused on the model’s eyes (which is where you should focus for most images with people). Then I had the model move out of the scene and took a second shot of just the street. However, my focus point (which was on the eye previously) was now over a section of the road fairly far away. As any good automatic focusing system will do, the camera made sure that point was in focus – shifting focus back making the area where the model was sitting previously slightly out of focus. You can notice this by looking at the street inside the lower part of the frame. It is much more out of focus than the surrounding street outside of the frame. I didn’t catch this mistake until I got home and started to blend the images together. Once I noticed it, I knew exactly what I had done wrong and my heart nearly stopped. I honestly contemplated not posting the image at all. I have done this idea several times since and have corrected my mistake! Oddly enough, as a colorblind individual I find colorful images very cool and as a result I love creating images with bright and bold colors. This paint toss shoot I did many years ago was my first attempt at such an idea. Although most people probably do not see anything technically wrong with the images, I DO! Again, it wasn’t until after I got home and reviewed the images that I discovered my error. All of the images were taken at ISO 1000! This may mean nothing to the average casual observer, but to pixel peepers like myself, I saw far more noise and grain in the images than I wanted, liked, or preferred. I’m not sure what I was taking pictures of prior to this shoot, but I forgot to reset my camera after that shoot (or before this one) to my base settings – which would have resulted in far less grain and image noise. I fixed the issue as much as I could in post processing but I prefer to get the image as near as perfect in camera. As a result of this error, I ROUTINELY reset my camera and check my settings before each and every shoot. A lot of photographers make fun of those that ‘chimp’. Chimping is when you take a picture and review it on the back of the camera before taking the next picture. Because of this next mistake, I have no qualms with chimping and chimping the ENTIRE image. With this macro shot, I set everything up, had my camera on a tripod, and had two flashes on either side of the glass for lighting. I was so concerned with trying to capture the actual splash and milk drop that I neglected to look at the entire image as a whole. As a result, I missed the fact that I had forgotten to turn on the left hand side flash – evident in the final image. This error cannot be fixed in post processing. Again, not an error I think most would notice or ascertain from the final image, but I KNOW! I now review my entire image not only focusing on the subject of the shot, but the background, highlights, shadows, and just about anything and everything else. I will chimp all day long if it means getting the proper image. And perhaps my biggest mistake...the Venus transit. An event that will never happen again in my lifetime and I failed to preserve it the best I could. I spent months learning how to connect my camera to a telescope. I purchased special equipment to mount the camera, a solar film to cover the telescope, and I even purchased a barlow lens to magnify the image. What I failed to do, however, was learn how my camera worked. I got tons of images and was very pleased with them for several months until I learned what shooting in 'raw' meant. All of the images I took were simple jpgs. Again, probably not a big deal to most but I missed the opportunity to grab ALL of the digital data from the shots to be able to edit the images to their fullest. And although you can edit jpg images to some degree, it's no where close to what you can do with a raw image. Sad, sad moment... These are only a few of the images that remind me this hobby is a process and that I am far from immune to making mistakes. These images are also milepost markers as to where I have been and where I am today in regards to my changing skillsets. Although I wish every image I took was award-winning, I don’t get nearly as upset now when I have a failure or two (or several). It just means I get to try it over again and that means making more creative images! Win win! So if your images are falling short of your expectations or if you made a straight up mistake, the worst thing you can do is give up. Rather, try the idea over again and attempt to correct the issue. The more you do anything, the better you will get at it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
SteeleKeep the interesting parts of life in focus. Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|