Homebody Photo Tip: Take a Bad Picture...Today!

     What kind of photo tip is this?  Take a bad picture today?  Yes.

     I believe that all great pictures start out as bad ones.  A picture you thought was going to be good when you took it.  But then turned out to be a disappointment.  Or, worse, a totally bad picture of something you really, really wanted to come out totally great.  I think these bad pictures make you better in the long run.

     I know that my mistakes, near misses, and disasters served as powerful motivators for me to become better.  And, believe me, I’ve had a lot of motivators along the way!

     Curiously, I noticed that even for a disaster picture, there was always something right about it.  A kernel of goodness you might say.

     It might have been the right location, or the right time of day, or even one part of the picture that was working while the rest was a disaster.  The idea behind the picture might have been great…but the execution was a disaster.

     You only had to move towards the good part and away from the bad.  Often the bad parts of my pictures were technical issues that could be improved upon with study and practice.

     The photo accompanying this post started out as a bad photograph in 1967.  I was at my brother Jim’s house in upstate New York wandering around with the 35 mm rangefinder film camera he brought home from Europe a decade earlier.  I took a picture of this little babbling brook near his house.

     Several days later after it was developed and returned to me, I noticed that the brook water was blurred rather than frozen in time as I had expected.  The rest of the picture was a disaster, a muddy brown, gray, and tan landscape photo typical of an overcast winter’s day in upstate New York.  But the unexpectedly blurred water part was pretty cool.
  
     Go forward 45 years:  Similar overcast winter day, but with better moving water, the proper equipment, and more knowledge.
 
     With the digital photography revolution comes an avalanche of information coupled with the instant feedback of your image appearing on the camera as you took it.  It doesn’t take years anymore to take the kind of pictures you want to take.
 
     But you still need to get out there and take those bad pictures first.  And, thanks Jim for bringing that camera home a long time ago.

     Kings Park Photo Club:  Our next meeting is on Thursday March 13, 2014 at 7 PM at the Kings Park Library.  Mike will be making a presentation on Street Photography.  Check out our members’ work on display at the People’s Bank on Indian Head Road.

     Thanks for reading, if you have any suggestions for topics please post them in the comments.