perfection
Perfection is just a distraction, yet another excuse to not do something. I tell myself this sunrise isn't good enough anyway, it's not foggy, it isn't even cloudy. All I want is to watch a few more reviews so I can choose a new lens and camera.
Photography is messy and chaotic, and that's the fun part of it. We need to embrace the uncertainity, make it part of our daily lives and create every day.
I'm currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, a book I'm enjoying very much. There's a passage that caught my attention:
On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.
(source: jamesclear.com)
This is yet another good example of why we shouldn't aim for perfection, why we should experiment and try different things and shoot a scene as much as we need.
We want to avoid overthinking our photography and become paralyzed.
Planning, strategizing and studying are all good and useful but eventually we will need to take action.
We need to finish what we start.
We need to be closers.
Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world. In a sport where every millisecond counts, you'd think he had the best running technique. He didn't.
The real difference comes to light when you compare him to his rivals. While everyone is tense before the race, he's smiling and already having fun. While everyone runs like perfect machines, his form is natural, light, and yet powerful.
Is he having fun because he's so good? Or is he so good because he's having fun?
I believe it's the latter.
Perhaps we could apply this to our photography. Perhaps we should loosen up, have more fun, improvise more, think less, forget about proper technique, dismiss proper composition.
A few days ago and while working on my YouTube channel, I came across some of the first videos I made.
They are just horrible.
I was partly aware of this when I published them, but at the time I was doing my best.
Today, I have better gear and I know more about video than I did back then. Most of this improvement happened because I started uploading videos and realized what was working and what could be improved.
If I had aimed for perfection I would have never published any video, post or image, ever.
We need to finish. A finisher gets better and better every time they put something out there. Only through practice can we improve.
I hope to come back to my current videos in a few years and see that, once again, they look horrible. That could only mean that my filmmaking skills improved.
