Honing Your Craft

I recently picked up an autobiography of Ansel Adams, probably the finest creative photographer ever. He was already an artist seeking perfection on the piano long before he ever made his first photograph. He firmly believes that this anal-retentivity from his musician days [my paraphrase] helped to make him a photographer that searched for that perfect photo and not be simply satisfied with an approximation.

I also once played the piano. I did not, however, achieve a skill level that would impress anyone. Indeed, I followed a philosophy of always wanting a new song to play, and never enjoyed replaying a song after I had already tired of it, regardless of its level of perfection.

My recent photoshoot with a model in Erindale Park made me realize a couple of things. First, I do not know what I'm looking for in the perfect photo. I'm sure I took hundreds of photos in the span of 2 hours. After taking them home and pouring over them, I pared the list down to 50 photos. Then after printing the shots, I cut it down to 10 by eliminating poses that were beautiful but had harsh shadows or points of blown out highlights. These last ten were what I'd consider adequate. Better poses had been cut but the lighting on each of these was satisfactory. However only two were what I'd call good. Lighting was nice, composition was strong and the model's expression touched something like genuine. But it was only after the fact that I knew what I wanted.

Although I'm sure Ansel Adams never took as many photos as I did in such a short time, I also believe that he often had many unusable prints that were never shown to anyone. I've heard before that a sign of a great photographer is one who only shows his great photographs. But I don't want to take several hundred pictures to get one or two good ones. I simply want:
A) Perfect exposure every time
B) Perfect poses from my model (having a few unusable photos when it’s the model's fault might be okay)
C) No crap in the background.
These are the three main reasons why any given photograph was cut.

I'm starting to view my camera, not as a magic box that takes nice photographs, but instead as a tool that has limitations, weaknesses and deficits that need to be recognized and worked around. Buying a new camera won't help - the problems faced are more to do with physics than camera construction. Getting what I want has gotten harder recently. Is this what the road to perfectionist feels like?

Model Shoot - June 2009

Oddly enough this site keeps coming up as the first link in Google for "Meadowvale Photography", so I figured I could update it once or twice a month. Keep in mind that the events are kept updated at the Meet-Up Group Calendar at:
http://www.meetup.com/Meadowvale-Photography/calendar/

We had an outdoor model shoot at Erindale Park on Sunday. For those who attended, send the photos to Arun.

Also - a Toronto night shoot is on June 19th, 2009. Meet at the Queens Quay terminal. Further details at:
http://www.meetup.com/Meadowvale-Photography/calendar/10621787/

Cheers.