It’s all a bit disingenuous this sharing “Best Pictures” shenanigans but we all do it !
The thing is we all give the impression that we exist in a bubble of photographic success and picture perfection but secretly embrace bucket loads of failure behind closed doors , nothing wrong with failure in street photography , its part of the process & journey towards success !
Reading these Foto What I Took blogs back I realised that I gave the impression of high levels of competence , ability and luck , nothing could be further from the truth !
My competence and ability are supported by a pedestal of regular failures that I never share (until today) and my luck is the bi-product of persistence sacrifice and hard work , the persistence , hard work and sacrifice can be the stumbling block for many , lets be clear, making good pictures is not easy but its not beyond most folk with a work ethic !
You can read as many “how to” Street Photography books as you like but you will not develop as a photographer unless you put in the hard yards and swallow heaps of disappointment out on the streets !
Todays featured picture failed , it is one of many failures from this shoot that did not make the cut during the edit , the reason it is featured here is that the importance of the edit rarely gets a mention and in my view shot selection should not be underestimated , culling the “Nearly” pictures is a important photographic skill , its what makes the good ones good !
To edit a shoot successfully you have to identify your aims and objectives , learning what a “GOOD” capture looks like is a important skill to develop whether you are behind a camera or a keyboard , recognising and axing the failures makes the good ones shine brighter , be ruthless , no excuses, cull the nearly pictures they are holding your photography back , raise the bar and ask yourself is “OKAY” , okay ?
Give the impression of a 100 % hit rate with the pictures you share , we all know that the real hit rate of good photographers is nearer one in one hundred but we don’t mention the failures …
Conversely new photographers have higher hit rates , that’s not because they are better than seasoned togs but because they are still working out their own personal interpretation of “Good” , it can’t all be good …
Street Photography should become more difficult with time as seasoned photographers demand more from themselves !
Learning from failures will feed your success , learn to fail with a smile on your face …
“Nearly pictures” dilute the strength of the good stuff , get rid of them or use them in a blog about photographic failure !
This series of blogs is based around pictures from my archive , I hope the words that accompany the featured pictures offer a level of context , insight and inspiration to readers .
“The Foto What I Took” blog title , is a comedy reference “borrowed" / inspired” by the Morcambe and Wise “The Play What I Wrote“ sketch …
MORE…
If your blessed with a bit more time feel free to visit highlights from my Another Day Off project , The State Of Britain series , The Testing Times pictures or the “In Progress” , “Living” In Limbo… , they represent the most turbulent years in modern British history and ten years of my life…
Many more Foto What I Took Blogs are available too…