Taking a Step Back

Today is going to be a lit­tle bit of a con­tin­u­a­tion of what I wrote after Tracy Turpen’s death a few months ago. I real­ize that was the moment when my renewed ini­tia­tive to post reg­u­larly went by the way­side. I don’t think it’s cause and effect, exactly, but it gave me some per­spec­tive, and helps me now when I go through my pho­tos and look at them, and edit them, and cri­tique them.

I don’t know exactly what my blog audi­ence is–I know some are pho­tog­ra­phers, I know some are friends, and fam­ily. I know some are strangers that are hap­pen­ing by, hop­ing to find a review of the Xpro-1 or the new Canon 5D mark III (yes, I’ve pre-ordered one). A great many have hap­pened by look­ing for news about Tracy, tes­ta­ment to the indeli­ble mark she has left on the world. This blog is, I guess, for the pho­tog­ra­phers after my own heart, but maybe (hope­fully) it will speak to oth­ers out­side of that.

“Oh no!” you’re think­ing, “here he goes ram­bling on again.” Since I don’t know who my audi­ence is exactly, I’m just going to go ahead and push on, in my way, and just write this how I want.

Any­way. As a pho­tog­ra­pher with a great deal of time and money invested in the pur­suit of beau­ti­ful, inter­est­ing, and/or com­pelling images, I have a large col­lec­tion of pho­tos of all sorts of things–some sub­lime, some mun­dane. This is both a bless­ing and a curse. Some­times it is hard to see the for­est for the trees, and some­times hard to see the indi­vid­ual trees in the forest.

If I’m not shoot­ing some­thing with an obvi­ous theme–like a wedding!–I am often wan­der­ing about with some vague notion of what I want to shoot in my mind. Some­times I want to shoot with a spe­cific lens, some­times I want to shoot for a spe­cific look, some­times I just want to be out shoot­ing. Some­times I find what I’m look­ing for, some­times I end up with noth­ing, some­times I end up with a bunch of shots I thought I didn’t want.

A lot of times, if those images don’t fit into what­ever par­tic­u­lar some­thing I was try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate, I dis­miss them, edit them out, move on. Impor­tantly, though, I very rarely delete things that might have some merit or inter­est. You see, I know I am capri­cious and sub­jec­tive and let emo­tions and cir­cum­stance cloud my judge­ment. I know that I am fickle and a per­fec­tion­ist. I know that some­times I move past a photo because of some per­ceived defect that both­ers me to death, but isn’t really rel­e­vant in the grand scheme of things.

I have read a lot recently about not going through and edit­ing your pho­tos right after you’ve shot them, instead let­ting them sit for an hour, or a day, or a week, or a year, before going back and look­ing at them, and decid­ing which shots make the cut and which don’t. I don’t fol­low this line of thought exactly, but I see its point and its merit. I do try not to delete in-camera unless the shot is obvi­ously a dis­as­ter, and I try not to delete on com­puter unless there is a com­pelling rea­son. There are thou­sands and thou­sands and thou­sands of pho­tos on my hard drive that may never see the light of day. But some­times, what­ever lit­tle nig­gle was both­er­ing me about a photo six months ago, will now be a non-issue.

I may finally go back to a photo and appre­ci­ate the con­tent over the tech­ni­cal aspects, which is what’s really impor­tant about all of this, any­way. And that’s what Tracy’s legacy to me is, at least for now. She helps remind me, as I go through pho­tos, of what is impor­tant in my pho­tos. It’s not that the photo was shot on a 5D at f/16, or that I used a slow shut­ter, or that the subject’s eyes aren’t per­fectly in focus. It’s that the pho­tos, with all their warts and bumps and imper­fec­tions, tell a story about me and my world. They tell my story, and the sto­ries of my friends, and the sto­ries of my home, and the sto­ries of my trav­els. They reveal things about me, and about other peo­ple. They com­mu­ni­cate, they amuse, they document.

I’m not sug­gest­ing here that you if you are a seri­ous pho­tog­ra­pher that you shouldn’t care about the tech­ni­cal stuff. God knows I have to try hard not to geek out about gear every time I make a blog post. But I am sug­gest­ing that you think twice before you delete an image, or that you give your­self that space for per­spec­tive. I know that not every image I take will be per­fect (or any, for that mat­ter), or com­pelling, or widely appeal­ing. But I know that, in gen­eral, I took that photo for a rea­son, and that that rea­son may mat­ter to some­one some­where some­day. That some­one might be me, and it might strike future me for rea­sons that didn’t occur to present or past me. Or it might tell me some­thing new in a way I didn’t see before. Or maybe it will still be bor­ing, but at least I will have let it have its chance.