The Courage to Make Mistakes: The Life of a Photographer

When I first started taking nature photographs, I assumed that as I acquired more experience, it would take me less pictures on each outing to get good shots.  What I hadn't realized at the time was that as I became more passionate about photography, I would become more intrigued with trying out new techniques.  Inspired by incredible pictures that my friends had taken, I was compelled to experiment with multiple aspects of photography including taking pictures at different angles, with different lighting, and from different vantage points.  As I have become a more experienced photographer, the number of pictures that I take has actually increased as I experiment more and more.

What has decreased though, is the amount of photographs that I share with my friends on picture sharing sites such as Facebook.  During the last year and a half, I feel like I have developed a more discriminating eye when it comes to choosing which pictures to share.  This has come about through careful analysis of my own and friends' pictures to determine what it is about individual photographs that make them so compelling.  In the beginning, I often needed to ask my friends which pictures they particularly liked since I didn't yet have criteria for what made one picture better than another.  Now, I feel like my eye is more trained and can often figure out what makes some pictures interesting and not others.

As I've spent more time with my camera and looking at pictures, I feel like I am living up to one of my favorite quotes about art.  It is from The Dilbert Principle, by Scott Adams.  "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  ART is knowing which ones to keep.  

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A few months ago, I wanted to create a blog post entitled "Best of Seasonal Photography from the Past Year".  However, in looking through my pictures on iphoto, I realized that I did not have many captivating winter pictures.  During the last few weeks I've come to realize that taking original winter pictures is challenging.  With white snow blanketing most of the landscape it can be difficult to capture contrast, color, and shadows on film and to break away from the typical shot showing the amount of snow.  As a result, I've tried taking winter pictures in new ways and attempted to find original subjects.  

Below are the results of some of my experiments with creativity and my art of determining which ones to keep.

1.  This is a picture from the blizzard of December 26, 2010:

Late in the afternoon, it was too cold and windy to venture outdoors to take pictures of the storm in progress.  Standing on my front porch, I decided to capture some images looking outward, although snowflakes swirled around me.  Taking numerous images, many of them were obscured by the white blobs of snow.  However, in the picture above, the white blobs enhanced the image of a snowy, blustery afternoon in New England.

2.  This is a picture of Spy Pond, right across the street from me on New Year's Day, 2011.

There was still much snow on the ground and Spy Pond was completely frozen.  That day an incredible sunlight illuminated the winter wonderland.  Intrigued by light and shadows, I wanted to capture the effect of the sun on the frozen pond.  Many of the pictures I took showed too much glare from the sun, were too bright and overexposed, or the effects of the sunlight were not interesting enough.  The picture above perfectly captured the mood of the day and the brilliance of the sunlight.  I gave it the following caption:  Shimmering ice-- love the way the sunlight seems to skip across the ice.

3.  This is a picture taken from my living room window during the winter storm of January 12, 2011.

Warm and toasty in my apartment during a Snow Day, I wanted to take pictures of the incredible amounts of snow but did not want to venture outside.  I decided to experiment with taking some photographs from the windows.  Many of these shots were utter failures--- the reflection of the flash against the glass, the mesh of the screen creating distracting patterns, etc.  I was lucky though and found this window which gave me a clear view of the winter landscape outside.  

4.  This is a picture of an icicle outside of my house on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

I love icicles.  To me, it is so neat how the icicles stay hanging for so long and reflect the light of the sun.  On Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, there were some incredible icicles hanging from my roof and from some branches near the drainpipe.  Trying to capture the beauty of the icicles was challenging-- even shooting pictures from multiple perspectives did not capture their illumination by the sun.  Then I played around with capturing the interesting shapes of the icicles instead.  This was my favorite of those series of pictures.  

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As I've become a more experienced photographer, I've had a lot of fun letting my creativity loose-- experimenting with different photographic techniques, taking pictures from different vantage points, and playing around with the aspect of the image that I want to focus on.  Although experimentation results in many mistakes, I learn so much from them about what works well and what does not work.  Over the last year and a half, I feel like I've developed a more artistic and discriminating eye for photography.  Now I feel like I am better able to figure out which of my photographs to keep.  All of my practice with photography is starting to pay off!  I finally feel like I have some Best of Winter Photographs and the first two pictures in this blog were recently published in the local newspaper!


To readers of this blog--  I am interested in hearing about times that you have let your creativity loose and allowed yourself to make mistakes.  How did this feel?  What were the results?  What did you learn?   If you are so inspired, I would love to hear about it in a comment.