Mediocre Monday

Welcome to Mediocre Monday, a feature I'm trying out here on the blog, where we look at some attempts to photograph a subject that didn't work. Why? It's easy to get disheartened about your artistic endeavor when you produce something that doesn't live up to your expectations. This holds double if you follow any artists you admire, because you see that their final result is so utterly amazing. What you don't see is the hours upon hours of practice, and their failures to capture what they wanted. Today, and potentially on future Mondays, I will share with you my failures.

Today is a little special, since this is the first Mediocre Monday. I'm going to show you ten times I failed to get a picture of a bridge.

First attempt, in which I underexpose the image. This probably could be corrected by post-processing, but then the focus isn't quite right, and the angle is a little awkward.

Second attempt, in which I manage to focus the camera on some random spot. Every interesting feature in the picture is out of focus. At least I managed to get a decent white balance.

Third same as the second. Nothing in the image is in focus.

Fourth attempt. Maybe if I move down river I can find a shot of this thing. Nope. Again the focus is... somewhere. Unfortunately that somewhere is nowhere to be found in the image.

Fifth attempt. (Day 2) Back to the first spot. I've managed to convince myself here that I can somehow keep the 400mm lens steady enough to shoot at 1/6th of a second. I couldn't. (No one can. Get a tripod.)

Sixth attempt. Still trying and failing to keep a heavy lens balanced enough to hit 1/6th of a second. It's better than the fifth attempt, but it's still janky enough to make you dizzy.

Seventh Attempt. (Third Day) The slightly less completely insane 1/10th of a second. This time I convinced myself that my monopod was steady enough to get that slow exposure. (It wasn't)

Eighth attempt. Basically the same shot as number seven, but this time adding in a complete lack of focus. (Again 1/10th of a second.)

Ninth attempt. This time I've bumped up the ISO speed from 200 to 800 so I'm now shooting at the entirely reasonable 1/60th. We're a little underexposed, but I could live with it. If only I could have focused correctly. I think this time I focused, switched off auto focus to adjust the angle, and didn't correctly confirm focus before the shot.

Tenth attempt. This time I've managed to capture a mostly in-focus image. It's a little under-exposed, but fixable. It's also not as crisply focused as I wanted, but it's ok. I still probably wouldn't put this in my portfolio.

Ten attempts. Ten failures. Will number eleven be the one that does it? Will it take another hundred attempts? Who knows. Next time you're discouraged that someone seems to be able to produce 'good' results every time, remember that you're only seeing the stuff that's good enough to share.

(If you're an artist, and would like to guest post on a Mediocre Monday to share your failures, get in touch, I'd love to have you.)