Behind the Curtain

You know in the Wizard of Oz when the wizard is all like “don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain!”? Because instead of some all-powerful being, he turns out to be just a regular dude?

I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to hide the ways that I am just a regular person who tries a lot of things and fails in order to reach gems. I don’t want to pretend creativity flows out of me like a spigot turned full blast all the time.

A truly awful double exposure on the same roll as one of my favorites.

It’s not just Instagram that makes it easy to share the highlight reel of our lives and our work…I mean, there is no gallery called “Ansel Adams’ Failed Attempts”. That isn’t what people want to see; they want to see his beautiful successes. That’s what makes the money.

But actually, I think it would be cool to see the failures along with the successes; it makes someone’s body of work multi-dimensional to see where they started or how they fell along the way. Because the stories of the trash images give the gems directionality—a bit of a provenance.

I owe Cami every apology for thinking this could be a good idea.

All-too-often I hear people say they are afraid to try new things.

They say they want to try, but they’re afraid of light leaks or souping or multiple exposures or freelensing. I admit this confuses me a bit when people say they’re afraid, because it must mean something else.

Does it mean they’re afraid of “wasting” money (spoiler: it’s not a waste to experiment, even if it doesn’t turn out as you hoped.) Does it mean the processes intimidate them because they feel shrouded in mystery, and they’re not totally sure how to execute them? Or is it that they’re afraid of trying them and “failing”?

Some of the worst placement in history. The fact that I’m putting this on the internet shows how dedicated I am to revealing failures.

I am convinced it’s often the latter. I think people feel fear over trying these things and not getting the results they long for. I think for the people who are afraid, any sort of failure would tell them something negative about themselves—probably it would indicate they’re not as good or talented or creative as they want to be.

I don’t exactly know how I escaped being haunted by such a fear, because I have plenty of easy triggers in my life, but I am thankful that this isn’t one of them.

Same moment, different Cameras. Ironically the one I love is using my plastic camera, wedged against a rock. The image on the right is just a huge mess and I hate everything about it 😂

Because not having that fear whispering in my ear allows me to be free. Allows me to try new things. Allows me to fail and keep going.

As engineers and other scientists know, failure is the first step to success. You have to start somewhere—get some sort of a baseline—to start figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

As Thomas Edison said “I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work” And if this isn’t just exactly it.

Two from the same roll again. The top is one of my favorites ever, but the bottom is how I learned I don’t like super busy images on the red scale side of EBS.

I don’t want to contribute to a notion that photography needs to flow perfectly and beautifully out of the artist.

On a single roll I end up with duds and gems side-by-side. I’ll experiment and try it a few different ways, knowing each version will give me data points on how to move forward.

So this is me showing you just a couple of my myriad failures in hopes of being transparent. The curtain is wide open, and the regular person behind it is more than happy to be revealed.

End Goals Are Depressing

Intuition