Every photographer you look up to has thousands of pictures you’ll never see—the ones that didn’t quite work, the ones that felt flat, the ones they looked at and thought, what was I even trying to do here?
I think about that often when I’m out with my camera. On the surface, a single photo can look effortless, like it just happened. But behind every frame you admire, there’s a trail of misfires, blurry shots, bad lighting, and moments of doubt.
Take me, for example. I’ve shot cooks in tight restaurant kitchens, parking officers on the street, and even abandoned machinery out in the woods. The photos you see on my blog are the ones I decided to share. But for every one of those, there are dozens that live hidden away on my memory cards—half-baked ideas, overexposed experiments, things I wasn’t quite ready to show.
And that’s the truth of photography: it isn’t just about pressing the shutter, it’s about wrestling with yourself. It’s looking at the back of the camera and thinking, this isn’t good enough. Then pushing yourself to try again anyway.
The photographers we admire most are not immune to this. In fact, they’ve probably faced it harder and more often. What separates them is not perfection—it’s persistence. They overcame their own self-doubt by shooting through it, by stacking thousands of unseen frames until the good ones started to shine.
So when I’m out there with my Sony slung over my shoulder, catching slices of life in Toronto streets or stumbling across rusted relics in the forest, I remind myself: every keeper I capture is built on the shoulders of a hundred quiet failures. And that’s okay. That’s how we all grow, one missed shot at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment