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186 - Intentional Failure: The Photography Skill No One Teaches · The Nerdy Photographer Podcast

• 0:01
  Casey Fatchett: Welcome back to the Nerdy Photographer podcast.
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  If you've spent any time in photography communities online,
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  you've absorbed a very specific set of values almost by osmosis.
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  Sharp is good, soft is bad, low noise is good, grain is bad,
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  perfect exposure is good, clipping is bad. Technical
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  excellence is the goal, and deviation from it is failure.
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  Today, I want to push back on that. Not because technical
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  excellence doesn't matter, it does, but because the relentless
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  pursuit of technical perfection can become its own creative
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  trap. And some of the most interesting, emotionally
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  resonant images in history of the medium came directly from
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  things going wrong. Here's a little personal anecdote to give
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  you an example. A while back, I was photographing a wedding
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  reception. Lots of fast movement, a low light venue with
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  a variety of different materials, including corrugated
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  metal ceilings and brick walls. The kind of situation where
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  everything has to go right technically for the images to
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  work. About halfway through the reception, I realized my remote
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  flashes had stopped firing. The battery had died on my
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  transmitter, and I had been so focused on what I was seeing
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  through the viewfinder that I didn't notice the flashes were
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  not going off. I wondered if any of the photos had come out
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  because my settings were incumbent on plenty of flash
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  lighting. As I flipped through about a dozen exposures, most of
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  them looked unrecoverable, except one. It was an image of
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  the bride standing under a single light, her head turning
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  away from the camera. The image, everything else in the image was
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  inky black, except for the bride standing in this pool of light.
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  Her dress looking absolutely amazing. I decided to convert it
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  to a black and white. It was incredible. It's a stunning
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  photo. It became one of my favorites for a long time, and
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  the couple loved it as well. And it never would have been
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  captured had the flash gone off. See, there's a reason why we're
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  trained to fear mistakes. Photography as a medium has
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  always had a complicated relationship with technical
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  failure, and it's worth understanding why we're so
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  conditioned to avoid it. In the film era, mistakes were
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  expensive. A miscalculated exposure meant a ruined frame. A
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  focus error meant an unusable negative. The economic pressure
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  to get things right technically was real, and it shaped a
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  culture where technical mastery was the prerequisite for
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  creative expression. Digital removed most of that economic
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  pressure, but the cultural value remained the same. We still talk
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  about keepers and rejects in terms that treat technical
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  correctness as the primary filter. Editing software has
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  tools specifically designed to rescue technically flawed
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  images, noise reduction, sharpening, highlight recovery,
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  because the assumption is that technical flaws are problems to
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  be solved, rather than potentially interesting features
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  of an image, and sometimes they are problems. A soft focus on an
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  eye that was meant to be sharp is usually just amiss. But the
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  habit of treating all technical deviation as failure worth
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  correcting makes us blind to the cases where the deviation is
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  actually doing something. There can be esthetics to the error.
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  Lens flare is the clearest historical example of this. For
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  decades, optical engineers worked to eliminate it,
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  developed multi-element lens coatings specifically designed
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  to prevent internal reflections from scattering light across the
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  frame, and they largely succeeded. Modern lenses are
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  extraordinarily well controlled in this regard, and yet
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  photography. now actively seek out vintage lenses, uncoated
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  glass, and deliberately shoot into light sources to produce
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  the flare that engineers spent their entire careers trying to
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  eliminate. Why? Because the flare does something to an image
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  that technically perfect glass can't. It places the viewer
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  inside the scene. It makes the image feel like it was taken by
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  a human being with a physical object rather than rendered by a
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  machine, it's organic in a way that precision isn't. The same
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  is true of film grain, while whole software categories now
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  exist to simulate that exact look of vignetting, which
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  photographers add back in post after paying for lenses
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  specifically engineered to minimize it of chromatic
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  aberration, which certain portrait photographers
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  deliberately leave uncorrected because the color fringing on
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  eyelashes and hair can add an unexpected delicacy to the
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  images. These aren't mistakes being tolerated; their
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  characteristics being recognized and used. All right, let's talk
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  about dragging the shutter.
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  Let's get specific about this technique that lives entirely in
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  the territory between failure and intention. Dragging the
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  shutter means using a slow shutter speed, slow enough that
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  ambient light registers significantly on the sensor, in
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  combination with a flash. The flash freezes the subject at the
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  moment it fires, creating a sharp. Image, but the slow
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  shutter also captures the motion blur of everything moving in the
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  scene during the exposure, including any movement movement
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  from your subject before or after the flash fires. The
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  result is an image that contains two types of information
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  simultaneously: the frozen clarity of the flashlit moment
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  and the streaked painterly record of the motion surrounding
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  it on a dance floor. This produces images that genuinely
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  feel kinetic. You can see where the person was and where they
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  will where they will go within the same frame. It's a technique
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  that looks like a mistake to someone who doesn't know what
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  they're seeing and looks like deliberate artistry to someone
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  who does. The mechanics are straightforward. You set your
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  shutter to somewhere between 1/15 and a quarter of a second.
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  Set your flash to fire either at the beginning of the exposure
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  first curtain sync or the end second curtain sync, which tends
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  to produce more natural-looking motion trails, and shoot it in a
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  situation with interesting ambient light. Then experiment
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  with how much subject movement occurs during the exposure.
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  Second curtain sync is worth specifically understanding
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  because the flash fires at the end of the exposure rather than
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  the beginning. The motion blur trails behind the subject rather
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  than appearing in front of them, which looks far more natural to
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  the human eye since we associate trailing motion with the
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  direction someone something came from rather than where it's
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  going. Let's talk about intentional versus unintentional
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  failure. The distinction I want to draw clearly is between
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  intentional and unintentional failure because this episode
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  isn't an argument for randomness. Unintentional
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  failure is a missed focus when you meant to nail the focus, a
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  blown highlight when you meant to retain detail, a camera shake
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  when you meant to shoot sharp. These are worth learning from
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  and worth minimizing through better technique. Intentional
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  failure is a deliberate choice to break a technical rule
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  because you understand what the breakage will produce and you
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  want that result. The key word here is understanding. You can't
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  deliberately use motion blur until you understand what
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  shutter speeds produce it and under what conditions. You can't
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  deliberately exploit flair until you understand where it comes
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  from and how to control its intensity. Technical mastery and
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  intentional failure aren't opposites. Mastery is actually
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  the prerequisite for meaningful failure because you can only
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  break rules with intention once you understand what the rules
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  are doing in the first place. The images that stay with people
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  are rarely the technically perfect ones. They're the ones
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  that feel like something. They carry energy or strangeness
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  that's correctly exposed, sharply focused, cleanly lit,
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  photographed. Sometimes just can't access. Technical
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  excellence gives you control, but control isn't always the
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  goal. Okay, here's your homework from this episode. It's what I
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  call the broken session. Go out specifically intending to make
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  technically incorrect images. Set a shutter speed that's too
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  slow for the situation. Manually focus past your subject. Shoot
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  directly into a light source. Try to produce three images that
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  are technical failures but emotional successes, where the
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  flaw is carrying some of the meaning, review them honestly
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  and ask whether any of them are doing something that a correct
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  version of the same shot couldn't have done. I hope you
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  enjoyed this episode, and until next time, stay safe and stay
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  nerdy.