On the Discrepancy Between How We Feel When Taking Pictures and the Results
I’ve heard too few photographers talk about the phenomenon between how we feel when we’re taking pictures and the results. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans had a multi-syllable word for it. But we English-speakers certainly do not. So here’s a common scenario to describe what I’m talking about.
You go out to shoot some street photography…but it could be any genre. Doesn’t matter. And once you start walking around and taking shots you come to the realization that your heart’s not in it. Could be any number of feelings that you’re experiencing, like hunger, fatigue, boredom, etc. This could be combined with your Inner Critic telling you that there’s nothing of interest to shoot here or that every photo that you’re taking is absolute crap. It could be any number of issues and combinations thereof. The whole point of it is that you’re having an off day and your images are going to turn out to be garbage. Or so you think.
Then when you get home and go through the images and start editing them, you realize that you actually captured some great shots! In fact, your ratio of keepers is actually better than normal. And you think to yourself, man, and I was having a bad day. And I got these amazing shots? What gives?
The reverse is also true.
You’re out on a beautiful sunny day. Everyone smiles at you. A few people come up and have meaningful conversations. Your subjects appear out of nowhere and surprise you with all kinds of photo opportunities. It’s like walking through a dream. It’s an easy and pleasant day and you nearly fill your card with images.
But then you get back home and open up your images. They’re terrible. Or mediocre at best. There are few or no keepers. And you wonder, what happened here? I thought I had some wonderful shots! It was such a good day.
Sound familiar?
This is the discrepancy between how we feel when we’re taking pictures and the results. Not all of our sessions are like this, of course, but this situation pops up more than we like to admit. It’s like this for me, speaking for myself.
What To Do About It?
The short answer is, that there’s nothing we can do about it. This is how life works, and life does interact with our personal photography. Half the battle is recognizing the fact that this is how it goes. On some days, we’ll be shooting in states of euphoria and then there will be days when it feels like we’re shooting on the lower plains of hell. There are two things that ultimately matter, embracing the process and getting results.
I’d like to throw a few bullet points at you of tips that I use to regulate the situation when it comes up. And I’m mainly going to deal with the bad-days-when-shooting scenario because these are the sessions that make us want to quit taking pictures — after taking time out of our day to go out and take pictures, perhaps involving considerable time in travel, on top of the actual time spent shooting. We may as well deal with the bad days and turn them into potentially productive ones, right? I’ll also talk about the flip side of this coin too at the end.
If you’re having a particularly terrible day, force yourself to go another half-hour to an hour. Give your mood a chance to change. Just as important, maybe a surprising photo opp will come your way.
Embrace the process. Even personal work isn’t always fun. It’s work! Bulldoze through the shitty feelings and obstacles and finish what you’ve started. Make it a point of pride. Pretend you’re a journalist on assignment from a prickly editor. Whatever it takes to get you to the finish line.
This is a last resort kind of tip. If there’s a cafe nearby, duck in and have a coffee. Or similarly, do something else and put your camera away. Maybe try walking for a while. Perhaps the mood will pass. It’s important though not to reward your bad moods with cafe stops or other forms of pleasure-seeking. You’re out to get pictures, not to create frivolous expenses.
There are numerous mind games you could play. It’s just about grinding through it, like any bad day at the office.
Good Day But Bad Images
So you’ve had one of the most memorable photo walks in recent memory. You fill your SD card with images. You’re ready to spend hours culling and editing tons of good stuff and you can’t wait to share it all.
But the images just aren’t there. In fact, it turns out you’ve got nothing really to speak of. You spend an hour culling through your images in Lightroom and end up depressed because you know that you’re going to delete everything from your hard drive.
A few bullet points of advice on this:
They all can’t be keepers. It’s a cold, hard fact that we must accept, no matter how well the day went when we took the shots.
If there was potential in the location you were shooting, make a plan to go back later and get the shots.
Move on. Why spend time agonizing over not getting anything? If you want to do something productive instead, figure out why you didn’t get the shots. Was it just an unlucky day (despite having an awesome one) or are there some technical aspects of your photography that could be improved? If anything, find a takeaway that will help you become a better photographer.
I’m not going to waste words on ways to feel good about yourself after bungling hundreds of bad images — after having an otherwise awesome day doing something that you love. The bottom line is that we’ve got to accept the good with the bad. And like everything else, photography, your passion, isn’t above the laws of experience.
