Sometimes, as a photographer, you take a picture and think, “ugh! I’ve mucked that up!” Too dark, too bright, or perhaps out of focus. Maybe heads are cut off. You name it, we’ve all had that moment, right? Most of the time we remove the image. We move on and forget that it was ever taken in the first place.
Sometimes though, we need to take a pause. Stop and look at what we’ve just taken. Try and assess it using more than the criteria we are used to judging it against. That’s how I looked at the image above originally. It was a blur. A mess of shapes. In my haste to whittle down 500+ images into those which I considered more usable, I ignored this one. Didn’t give it a second glance, until I’d finished curating the rest of the “good” images. I went back to see if there were any I’d missed. I gave this another look, and I’m glad I did.
Seeing this image again, it actually served as a perfect metaphor for my editing process. Utter chaos, punctuated with occasional moments of clarity. Is it technically a good image? Possibly not. Does it help convey a sense of the moment, and help tell the story? I’d say it definitely does. Maybe I shouldn’t judge images so quickly in the future.