My office is so quiet now. My wife is off in another area and the cats are napping somewhere. I decided to take a moment to review some of the best images I have ever taken, and my mind is quiet, but with a kind of silent dissatisfaction. I am so tempted to jump in and re-edit them, or often just toss them because I have become bored with them. I did that recently. I tossed hundreds of prints and thousands of digital files.
Don’t get me wrong, they were good images and served my clients and me very well. It’s just that, in retrospect, I could have done better. Or perhaps it simply means my tastes have changed.
For example, there was a time when I was obsessed with ultimate sharpness, an artifact of digital photography. As I look at some of those images now, I realize I sometimes forced the sharpness to become the subject, inadvertently drawing attention away from a more important story that might have been expressed. Other times, I focused so much on the subject, no pun intended, that the image may have been great but was left almost completely sans context.
I loved those photographs at the time. I’d beat my internal chest as my mind declared, “Wow, I nailed the sharpness!” And looking back now, I did. But at what cost? Maybe my subject popped right off the frame in some instances, but it leaves me wondering now, was that simply a product shot, or could I have drawn out more of a story?
My quest for continuous improvement does that. As I look back now, I am thrilled that I never stopped at that one perfect picture and rested on that effort. I can look back and realize that perfection is about as fickle as my cats’ attention. Instead, when I look back, I see real growth.
So here is the real reason I am content to never be completely satisfied. When I look back at past creations, I realize I developed many skills through discipline and practice. I may have become too enamored with some of them in the moment, as I can see now, but those skills continue to serve me well. The ability to achieve extreme sharpness, isolate a subject, push hard light to the max, and all the other things I once obsessed over did not disappear when my tastes changed.
Interestingly, some of those once-perfect pictures that now leave me dissatisfied may mean even more to me than they did before. They are milestones. Reminders of what I learned, how far I have come, and how much there may still be to discover.
It is strangely satisfying to never be completely satisfied.
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