“Talent is a pursued interest. In other words, anything that you’re willing to practice, you can do.” (Bob Ross)

This quote goes in a similar direction as “The Habit“, from January 2018, and the photo below certainly falls under “practice” …even if it wasn’t intentional. :)

About a week ago, my friend Tracy and I wanted to get out and make photos. The back country seemed too far a drive, and conditions there wouldn’t be that appealing while we’re still waiting for rain, so I made the call and picked La Jolla’s Windansea Beach.

Earlier in the day, beautiful clouds had dotted the skies, and then for sunset, they all disappeared. Great! What’s more, the tide was going out, had almost reached its low, and the beach’s more interesting rock features were all still quite buried under the “summer sand” – without any winter storms, it hadn’t been washed away yet, of course. On top of that, the beach was teeming with people. It’s the price you pay for living in Southern California at this time of the year. On this Saturday afternoon and evening, everyone was out to enjoy one of those mild early November days.

With all this, we both felt pretty uninspired, but when you’re already there, you might as well practice. Wandering around I eventually found this set of rocks, and this is one of two uninspired “practice” photos that I made – the other one isn’t even worth showing in this context! :P

Honest Evaluations

I think what we all often fail to do, for various reasons, is to more honestly evaluate our own work. I know that I am not good at doing that at all! (and I have hundreds of blog posts online to prove it…). When the memories are still fresh and our impressions and feelings associated with a place are still vivid, we tend to see things in our photos that just aren’t there.

Then we post such work online, and social media’s feedback usually is that you either get the “Likes”, and favorable comments – or you get nothing. What’s also missing is an honest discussion of photographs. How do we do that in a friendly, social, personal and non-competitive way that helps us learn without ruining the fun? I haven’t found the answer yet, but I want to try and establish something like that for our photo club next year.

Anyway, here’s my personal, honest and hopefully realistic evaluation of the photo:

First, the workmanship. I made two exposures, one for the sky, one for the foreground, and they’re both good and serve their purpose (what I mean is: I don’t have to tweak or mess around adjusting the two individual exposures before blending them).

The photo is sharp where it matters, but it’s actually lacking some sharpness in the immediate foreground at the bottom. Either I should have stopped down more, or I messed up the focusing (more likely) and didn’t control it carefully enough afterwards. I camouflaged this shortcoming with some darkening at the bottom so that it isn’t really visible in the web version anymore (and the web here is the only place I’ll ever show this photo).

Second, the processing. I blended my two exposures using a luminance or luminosity mask – something I have to practice every now and then, because I like to work in even light with less contrast, and prefer to create images from single exposures. And of course I had forgotten the necessary steps and their order in Photoshop! I had to find a video to help me refresh my memory first. Once I did that it came back of course, and luminance masks are a really nice way to work with high contrast scenes.

What really “makes” this photo, in terms of processing, is most likely just the color though – once more the result of sticking to a daylight white balance of ~5000K, instead of “trusting” the camera’s auto white balance (way, way too cold).

And then third, there’s the artistry – the part that’s always hardest to judge, of course, because it’s highly subjective. Considering the amount of low-tide clutter and footprints everywhere, I pat myself on the shoulder for finding this little arrangement of rocks and getting a somewhat “clean” image with simple elements out of that mess – but here’s the thing:

Would anyone else be able to see the amount of searching, looking, trying, setting up the tripod and then moving on without making an exposure, that went into this photo? Of course not. So what’s left is a little tide channel that almost makes the eye escape on the right side of the frame, but maybe what’s saving things is the bright sky at the top that helps pull the eye back in, with the aid of the shape and detail of that center rock, and from there the eye can discover that smooth patch of sand below and to the left of it, which balances things. Maybe. It’s just how I perceive it.

So all in all, I’d say that the composition is somewhat decent, but again, this is all highly subjective. It may not work for you at all, and that’s okay. In the end, the photo falls into the “pretty picture” category (that category doesn’t satisfy me anymore).

All this massively gets in the way of the final, honest evaluation: you think of everything that you put into a photo, the drive, the time, the thought, the workmanship, the processing… it all makes you want that photo to work SO BAD. You want to dismiss its flaws and shortcomings, its uninspired uninterestingness, because YOU WORKED for it – and “it” doesn’t work. Perhaps there’s the element of gear as well: the more expensive the camera and lens (or the sheet of film), the more you might fool yourself into thinking that the photo just has to be good. ;-)

It takes courage and real honesty to see that, admit it, and confine that photo either to your local archives, to be seen only by you as a reminder of what you need to change, or to send it straight into the digital nirvana with a daring press of the DELETE key.

Remember: it was a good practice.