The Trial and Error Process of Photography
Recently I have been in pursuit of getting a photograph of a barred owl in flight. Now that I have discovered where the owls usually like to hang out in my local woods, and when I am likely to see them, my chances to catch them have increased. Even still, I am lucky if I can catch one for only a few minutes every several attempts. If I find one, and it decides to hang around long enough for me to get situated, I usually only have one shot to get it taking off before it flies away into the woods only to be seen another day.
This means that although I have been trying to locate these owls for months, I have only photographed them a handful of times (maybe coming closed to 10 times at this point). Within those ten times, a few times they took off while I was there, and others never moved and I wasn't going to disturb them to make them fly off. All those times where they did fly in front of me I have caught glorious out of focus photos. 😀
It's not really frustrating. I enjoy the learning experience, and I absolutely love seeing the owls in person. Even though I am still working on getting the camera to capture what I see, I do get to see it myself. But it does remind me that to get better at photograph you have to take a lot of bad photographs. I haven't really found a way around it. In every photographic discipline I've tried to tackle, or any particular shot I've tried to get, there's been at least a couple if not dozens of "failed" ones before it.
So here's to failing, and failing some more. One of these days I'll get one in focus. Or at the right shutter speed 😔
What's your trial and error process been like recently?
From this morning. Great light (for how early it was) and framing, just missed focus.
Mostly in focus, but extremely high ISO (10k+) and too low a shutter speed.
And just for fun here it is just sitting there and me waiting to see what it does. And enjoying getting to see an owl 🙂
