Excellence is elimination

Failure is the sound of a thousand wasted efforts screaming in unison.

The reality is most things aren’t that hard once you break it down. But too many of us are trying too hard to find the needle in the haystack. And that’s a crap shoot. What are the odds that in a split second, we’ll reach in and pull out that needle with a million choices in front of us? But we love stories of magnitude and myth. We love the idea that our heroes can, in one fell swoop, distill the most complex situations into a single, supercharged moment of perfection through superhuman insight. Forget about. It doesn’t happen that way. Maybe sometimes in some places, but not most times in most places.

Imagine how the world looks to a beginner. A myriad of options, each one of seemingly equal validity. All in front of you, all at once, with only seconds to react. It’s too much to process. And that’s really what it is about experience. It very often doesn’t move us closer to greatness, so much as moving us further away from badness. But that’s no less important, because all options are not equal, all moments are not equal, and all stories are not equal. And the more quickly and intuitively we can eliminate those options from consideration, the more effectively we can focus on the decisions we have at hand.

Looking for the wrong things
It’s not finding the needle in the haystack. It’s cutting out the noise in the background and the process that lets you do so. Ever walk around with a shot in your head? Something you saw that wasn’t from a wedding, that wasn’t about anything the slightest bit bridal, with that look and feel – the one that was exactly what you wanted for yourself? The one that was you? And you just kept looking and looking, waiting and waiting, and it never materialized. A whole day. Looking constantly for 10 hours for one simple thing to appear. And it didn’t. Maybe you didn’t get a room with the light you needed. Maybe the background you wanted never surfaced. Or maybe the emotional gravitas never materialized during the day. Photography is nothing, if not specific.

The real problem wasn’t what was around you. And it wasn’t what was in your head. It was that you were after the wrong thing. You don’t want to take the shot that Strand took. What you really want to be able to do is to take the shot that Strand would take in your situation. And, you don’t even truly want that. You want to learn what Strand would take, then use what you learn about yourself through the process to figure out what you would take now that you have Strand’s insight.

So the goal shouldn’t be to get those shots in our head and produce something that looks the same, and it shouldn’t be to swallow the totality of everything in front of us and absorb it in an instant. It should be to use those things that inspire us as a framework for exploration, so we can learn the process behind them. Shots aren’t preordained. They are happy accidents, lead by intention, and founded on a combination of preparation and discovery. In other words, photography isn’t seeing the big picture. It’s knowing how to stumble from one adjustment to the next, eliminating choices along the way, while focusing on others, until we find that one thing that says just what we want.

The worst thing that can happen is treating photography like a kid in a candy store. Where your mind darts from this to that to this until you have to make a choice, and you just go with the glossiest, most colorful label. That’s not you picking shots. That’s having the shots pick you. And, yet, that’s just what most people do. They look for the highest volume activity in the room, go there, point the camera, and shoot. Then they move on.

Getting focused
In painting, you create layers by putting on stroke on top of the next. In photography, you do it through a series of refinements and observations. You notice one thing, then another and another, and each one of those adjustments becomes part of the final collective picture. We may now realize they’re there, we may not see them as layers, but we feel it through the complexity, the perfection, and the nuance. Process clarifies, so develop a process of movement and constant refinement and create those layers.

Start by finding something interesting. Not necessarily dramatic. Just interesting. Ignore the rest. Position yourself so you can have that thing in the frame. Move higher, lower, left, right. See how everything around interacts with that thing as you’ve framed it. See what undermines the picture and doesn’t fit what you want to say. Maybe it’s a bright patch of color, a light, or a person with the wrong expression. Reposition yourself to cut them out. If you’re focusing on a person, watch the body language. See what works. Adjust your position to emphasize their body position. Look for expressions. Refine your timing. Cut out the actions that don’t fit, and watch for what does. Look behind, look around, see how it all comes together again. Refine your original thought. Your observations should be more specific now, so you should have more tangible ideas about what’s interesting. Now you’re starting to develop a theme. Cut out the the elements that don’t fit. Think a little more. Wait. Watch. Repeat as needed. Press when ready. That’s your shot.

Success is the sound of a single action made of a thousand efforts.