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A Thousand Ways to Miss a Shot
David Vestal once said photographers are "professional noticers." I notice things all the time that most people pass by blissfully unaware. Constantly looking. Constantly noticing.
I can tell when I get in "photographing mode" because I just start seeing pictures. As I go about my life in the world I'll think to myself (does that expression strike anyone else as singularly dumb? "Think to myself"? How else does anyone ever think?)—anyway, I'll think to myself, that's a picture right there or there goes another one.
And there are a thousand ways to miss a picture. Which, I suppose, is why it's most satisfying to go out photographing with a singular purpose—equipped, attentive, undistracted. Mainly, you drive past it. Or you don't have permission. Or it's fleeting, a momentary juxtaposition of moving things. Or the light changes. Or you don't have your camera with you. Or the thing you see suits another camera you own, but not the one you're using right then. Or I'll see four possible pictures and stop and get out of the car for the wrong one, the one I've taken before and seen before. The list goes on.
You've got to be prepared and ready, willing to stop, willing to do the work of getting the shot, because otherwise the missed opportunities will mount up and the whole experience will tip over into becoming too frustrating, too weighted with failure. You need to try hard to succeed because you need to succeed enough.
I've written in the past about some of "the ones that got away" (the expression comes from fishing). Most of them don't hurt.
Some hurt.
As you might know I'm between cars. I have a new bus; a friend will arrive today to pay me a wad of bills for the old sheet metal, and I'll be sorry to see it go. It's been a great little car and I've always liked it. In the new car, I've been carrying my camera. So, on Saturday, the magic happened. Picture the scene: a 1950s convertible, top down, parked in front of the backdrop of a big, hulking old stone church. A bride and groom in the front seat. Gathered around them, a semicircle of smiling, dressed-up wedding guests. In front of the car, a number of people raising phones in the air to capture the moment. And they're all just... there. I mean the scene is stable, not shifting or moving or dissolving. And right across the street, the grocery store parking lot. Where I can park within mere steps of the perfect standpoint to get a shot of the whole scene, with nothing to worry about but passing traffic possibly getting in the way. I'm thirty feet from the entrance and coming up on it. Perfect, perfect, perfect. I stand a real chance to get this one. And the sequence in my head goes: omigod perfect; they're not moving; camera's right here; I can swing into the parking lot and be right in position in like a minute.
And then...oh no, wrong car! I was driving the old Acura because I was going to the house of the friend who wanted to buy it so he and his wife could take a test drive. The camera was sitting back in my garage, eight miles away, in the other car. "Hold it right there! I'll be back in 25 minutes"? Arrrgh.
That wedding scene was one of the three best pictures I didn't take since 2022 when I got my current camera. Pure luck. Pure gift from the cosmos, the Universe, the gods. Missed it.
The part of the brain where guilt resides
I think I've now written about all three. (I guess doing so makes me feel a little better.) The first one was a breathtakingly picturesque thunderhead on the other side of the lake, with the sun behind one side casting out strong and dramatic crepuscular rays. I was out walking the dog, and was passing by a spot where the property owner has explicitly given permission for me to go on to his property to photograph the lake. And, setting out, I had considered bringing the camera along, and then had thought (to myself): why bother? I'm not going to see anything I haven't seen a million times before.
Well, I did.
The second was when a neighbor had the Mennonites clear half an acre of trees up on the hill, with front loaders and backhoes. The great heap of felled trees sat there for half a year, drying, and then one day I passed by and the Mennonites had built a giant pyre for burning, maybe two and a half stories high, interwoven, almost sculptural, as if it were crafted, with a giant stump like a crown on top. It was mystical, magnificent. I drove by that again and again, each time thinking (right, to myself) I've got to get a picture of that. With darkness coming and a brooding overcast gray sky, it looked fantastical, like it could have been raised by primitive Vikings or Druids a thousand years ago. Enigmatic. Architectural. Mysterious. Did I stop? No. Again and again, no. I was always rushing out or rushing home. The last time, I think I even thought (...), this looks fine, and I have my camera with me, but you know, to really get "the" shot I might have to come back again and again, photograph it in different light and at different times of day. Like that should stop me; why should that stop me?
And then came the day when I drove past and it was a heap of smoking ash.
All three are seared on my brain. The part of the brain where guilt goes. Of course it's a natural part of photographing; Ansel almost missed "Moonrise" and Eddie Adams clicked the shutter before the fatal shot and the Marines at Iwo Jima raised the flag a second time for the press cameras. Buzz and Neil didn't have the camera set wrong when they were hopping around on the moon. But every photographer misses shots too.
Fishing, you do usually catch a few. But oh, those ones that get away....
Mike
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