After this shoot, I was so disappointed in myself when I downloaded these images that I couldn’t bring myself to look at them again. They’ve been sitting untouched in my computer for about nine months. A week ago, when I was cleaning up some old files, I finally opened up these images and started doing some edits.
I get like this sometimes. I walk into a shoot with a strong vision in my mind of how it’s all going to unfold… the moments, the mood, the shots. My idea of what these pictures will be is so strong that when reality doesn’t line up perfectly, it feels like a personal failure.
I don’t shoot outdoors much. I like the control of the studio, where I can shape light exactly how I want it. Outside, I’m at the mercy of sun and all the messiness that comes with shooting outside. I brought a flash to establish some control. The flash is incorporated into most of the pictures in this gallery in some subtle way. While it helped, I still struggled with lighting, dynamic range, awkward shadows — not to mention physically navigating the rocky environment to find the angles I imagined.
But here’s the thing: time is a strange editor. It’s now nine months after the shoot. The vision I had locked in my head during the shoot is gone. I forget what I was hoping to get. With my expectations gone, I’m now seeing something different, and something beautiful in these images. What I thought was a failure just needed a little space or a little distance to reveal its own kind of rightness.
I’m still learning to let go of what I think I need to create. Letting go of the plan, the pressure, the imagined outcome, isn’t giving up and it isn’t failure. It’s simply making space for surprises. Because sometimes, the images you didn’t plan, the ones that sneak up on you, can be even better than the ones you imagined.
