If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.
I firmly believe that you can never succeed at an art form like photography unless you can learn to see, sometimes in an instant, the finished artwork as you look at the scene in front of you. This skill, which takes years of practice to hone, is essential and no meaningful work will be produced (except occasionally by accident) without it. This skill of pre-visualising and “seeing” is essential.
The craft of photography is learning how to translate the captured scene into a finished product that matches that previsualisation. This is a suite of skills that encompass camera handling and camera settings (at capture time) as well as various image editing and other intermediate procedures that come between capturing the image and presenting a finished version. This is the suite of skills that garner most of the attention on internet sites because it is easiest to talk about and it is also the subject of most marketing by companies with products to sell to photographers. This suite of technical skills is not essential for the photographer to have, however. In a good partnership, it could even be outsourced since the vision is the essential part. However, it is necessary and if you are a photographer who does their own image processing it can often make a real difference in how close to its potential a good image can come.
I find that I have one or two images that I have never been satisfied with my ability to process into what they should be. Into what I visualised them to be. This is one of them.
This is the fifth time I am presenting a version of this image and I doubt it will be the last. I think it is good to have benchmarks for yourself. We only see how far we have come when we look back.
smashandgrabphoto 