A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I had watched a workshop presented by Brooke Shaden and I'm going to mention it again. In that workshop Brooke talked about how there is no such thing as failure only missed opportunity. It's an interesting way to think about it. I can't regurgitate exactly how she said it but something about it made perfect and inspirational sense to me.
There's the "saying" that if you fail you just try and try again. But failure has such a negative connotation, no matter if we have the self-esteem or drive to continue on afterwards. There is still this darkness that hangs over us whenever we think we have failed. And sometimes it is something that continues to hang over us even after we have moved and succeeded in that which we thought we had failed.
But Brooke feels that we don't fail, rather our "failures" are simply missed opportunity. Missed because we either didn't catch the light at the right moment, we didn't direct our models effectively or we didn't think our concepts all the way through. So in effect we just didn't take the opportunity. But the nice thing is that we can catch those opportunities again. And we can make them ourselves.
Content | (c) M.M.Hewitt 2014
This shot came from missed opportunity. It's a beautiful picture, yes, and my model was such a trooper. It's difficult light painting objects that inherently move. And having to sit perfectly still for many many seconds is a very physically taxing thing to do. But she did great. It was me who couldn't get it right. She followed every single one of my directions perfectly. What I couldn't get was the light I wanted.
The goal of this shoot was to have a "double" exposure, lighting one side of the face serenely with a look of content and the other with a look of pain and emptiness. I just couldn't get a crisp delineation between the two sides and the color gel I had chosen for the half of pain required obscenely long exposure time and I just couldn't expect my poor model to sit there for such a long period of time. So I didn't really get the shot that I wanted. I ended up editing out the side of pain.
Which is interesting to me. Some would say that the shoot was a failure (i.e. I did not succeed in that which I had set out to accomplish) and would carry around that disappointment with them for a long time. I am choosing, both editorially in my photograph and emotionally for myself, to remove that disappointment. I am thoroughly content with this photograph. I love it. It's beautiful. Her serenity is exactly what I wanted. The color of light is perfect and whimsical.
This isn't to say though that I haven't thought about how I would, and eventually will, shoot this same image differently.