Went down to Lake Mirror yesterday evening to watch the sun go down and from the outset managed to get almost everything wrong.
Do you ever have one of those days when every little move you take is in the wrong direction and every attempt seems to come up short?
Sometimes we get to blame things or situations but sometimes we have to recognize when the failure is all ours. I just had one of those sessions where every adjustment I made with the camera was in the wrong direction and my brain couldn’t switch into a true correction mode.
I was keeping the camera is a fully manual mode as I was trying to develop more skills with controlling the aperture and shutter speed. Technically I seemed to be doing what I was trying, but artistically my results were coming out poorly.
Images weren’t warm enough, or lit enough, and the exposure just continuously felt wrong. And while I have shared some of the shots at the end of this blog that seem to be somewhat cool, they aren’t at all what I was trying to achieve.
Hope you find something there that you like.
The last two shots, where I ghosted myself into the frame as part of a long exposure, was my attempt to alter plans and resurrect something from the shoot and they kinda came out the way I planned.
These two shots had a shutter speed of 25 seconds and in each case I stepped into the picture for about ten seconds.
So, while those two images didn’t make it a complete victory, they certainly stopped it from being a complete loss.
And I think that it was this which spurred on my thought process this morning about the whole concept of failure versus defeat.
There are so many times in our lives that we experience failure. We all do. But it is how we react to the failure that really defines us.
My dear friend Carrie bought me a plaque many years ago with the saying “Never, never, never give up” and it is a sentiment that is not just true, bu is the foundation upon which we should all build our lives.
Failure can indeed be wilting. It can sap all your positive energy and make you lose your will to move forward. There probably isn’t an adult on the planet that hasn’t experienced such a moment.
But when we dig deep and find another approach, or an extra push, then we tell life that we may have failed but we do not accept defeat.
Human will and ingenuity are remarkable qualities and recognize it or not, they exist within all of us. There are many times when we have to look hard within ourselves to find them, but they are there.
And there are many times when we feel so worn down that it is just easier to accept defeat.
But that is never the right choice.
The right choice involves spinning and turning, pushing and climbing, and whatever else it takes to reject defeat.
Accepting defeat preys on a weakness that exists within us, but we all have the inner strength too … the inner strength that finds a way, regardless.
As we go through life it behooves us to accept our weaknesses but build on our strengths, because whatever success we have in life will likely come from the latter.
Hopefully my next shoot will deliver some success and all the better if it comes from something that I learned from last night’s failures.
I am quietly confident!
