On a long Saturday night during my recent trip to Warwick I sat around a covered fire pit with a group of friends drinking, smoking, and enjoying the crisp upstate New York air. I remember slurping down the last of my beer and tossing it into a big blue bin as I walked up Erin's stairs towards the bathroom. While climbing, I looked to my left and was engrossed by what I saw. A curving path leading to a gorgeous flying buttress-like archway I hadn't seen during my first time exploring the house stood in front of me, partially blocked by a thriving hedge. The path and the form of the archway created a gorgeous s-shaped curve I knew I needed to capture on film, so I trotted away from the bathroom and towards the basement, where my film camera rested in a backpack underneath a pile of clothes.
I ran back and framed the shot many, many times, struggling to manipulate my shutter speed and aperture to find enough light to balance my meter. When I felt my settings were right, I took the shot and walked back to the bathroom feeling content despite my dizziness.
When The Color House sent the scanned roll of HP5 black & white film back to me, I raced through the images to find this one frame, and when I did, I felt absolutely deflated. I'm not sure what went wrong, but the image looked hazy, the blacks faded to a soft gray. The image below is what I was able to salvage from the scan file with some light dehazing and contrast-boosting in Adobe Lightroom.
This made me consider one of the most inevitable, yet crippling quirks of the photographic medium, especially on film: no matter how perfect your framing, composition, and light are, there's always the chance that a brilliant opportunity turns into a horrifically unusable photograph. I came to appreciate (and even like) the image's flawed charm and relocate what I'd loved about the original composition, but I was frustrated to see a frame I fell in love with turn into something imperfect.
Something similar happened to the image below of the two chefs on their smoke break. I passed these gentlemen on my way to work a couple of weeks ago and spotted how elegant and stoic they looked smoking in their all-white uniforms against the grittiness of the garage backdrop. They saw me pause and notice them, but I'd lost my chance to capture them in as nonchalant a state as they were in seconds before. I told them that I was a street photographer and that I thought they looked very cool smoking against the garage, and asked to take their picture. They appeared uncomfortable and awkward, unsure of how to position themselves. The best frame I walked away with is the one below, which I'd like more if the younger chef wasn't blinking and the older chef's head was turned the opposite way, looking into the frame.
How do we, then, as photographers, cope with our inability to capture every "decisive moment," every perfect gesture, gaze, or expression that appears in front of us? How do not consider what could've been when we look at images that are almost there, but not quite? Obviously, I'm still struggling to find answers to these questions.
The best one I've ever been able to come up with, though, is actually a bit of wisdom I gleaned from one of my favorite photo-vloggers, Sean Tucker. In a recent video, he urged his viewers to shun perfectionism and view each imperfect picture and missed opportunity as a mere draft along a longer journey of creativity. While this might not take the sting away from looking at an image I'm almost perfectly happy with, it allows me to sidestep my fear of failure and encourages me to get my ass back out on the street and get back to shooting.
To end this post on a more positive note, I'd like to veer away from the existential doubts that plage any artistic pursuit to share some images from the roll that I do think worked quite well. I hope you enjoy them!
I took this portrait of my friend (and old acapella buddy) Gabby outside my apartment building. I absolutely love the strong, but calm look in her eyes, and the way the light catches in her highlights.
I took this shot peering into the window of a barber shop on Fordham road. It's a bit abstract, but I found myself feeling really drawn in when I first looked at it. There's evidence of life in the frayed corners of the magazines, stories asking to be told. Plus, the light's awesome. That always helps, I hear.