The Quiet Picture

I don’t know if it was the cold holiday week in the mountains or the over-effective air conditioning in the office, but I’m definitely coming down with the flu. The worrying part is that this is the second time in less than three months while I’m normally only sick once or twice a year. But uncharacteristically, this time I’ll try to see the positive side of it. For one thing, it’s Thursday. For the second, I’m not stressed.So?

As recently as a couple of years ago I normally never got sick in the middle of the week. Only during weekends or the holidays, I was so uptight and constantly stressed that my body wouldn’t give in to a bug until it was officially time to relax. Now I’m more relaxed every day, so I can get decked any day of the week. Wo-hoo!

But the funny thing is, now that I’m sick I seem to be even more relaxed. I haven’t completely given up on taking things too seriously so when things start going wrong, I take it hard. But on days like today… I just don’t care! Feeling miserable in every other way protects me from the complications at work, so everything can start falling apart around me and my biggest concern will still be if I’m overdosing on Fisherman’s Friends.

I wish I could tap into the nevermind-mentality without being sick. I don’t want to adopt a casual attitude towards work, but I would just like to be able to take it easy even when the going gets tough and spare myself from the tensions and headaches that used to be my constant companions. The physical discomfort seems to build an emotional barrier of a kind… The last time I was sick, I watched a film that I have never been able to see without crying. But that time, I got through it with dry eyes and I loved it! Anyone knows how to build that barrier without the sore throat and infected sinuses?

The other week I came across some orchids just barely in the bloom. Without hesitation I pulled out my big gun, attached a 31mm extension tube and set to work. In the viewfinder and on the LCD display everything seemed to be just fine, I was brimming with expectations when I downloaded the images to my computer. But alas, it was not to be so. It was the same old story, there was some little thing or two wrong in every frame but mostly I fretted about DOF. Well, I got lucky and the weather held for the next day, so I just drove back there determined to do it right this time. I made sure that I considered everything - check DOF preview, focus behind and in front to find additional distractions, bracket, change ISO speed, even try with and without image stabilisation.At home I was ever more expectful to see beautiful, perfect images of budding orchids, but what happened?

My favourite from those two sessions is one of the shallow DOF images from the first day (below). What otherwise would’ve been my favourite from the second day was spoiled by an intruding, slightly OOF leaf in lower left corner that I had to gaussian blur out of the way to save the image from the bin (the original un-edited version is above here). I swear for the life of me I didn’t notice the leaf on location, not even with DOF preview, not with focusing in and out, I just simply didn’t see it. Could I blame the 20D viewfinder with 95% coverage for it? Was my intruding leaf in the missing 5% area?

So even with the benefits of instant feedback, I still didn’t do any better the second time around. Is this as good as it will ever get?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a little bit too critical about my photographs. Every single picture I take, there always seems to be at least one detail I’m not happy about, whether it’s the exposure, the DOF, the composition, a distracting element in the picture… heck, sometimes I don’t know why I took the image in the first place! Must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time…

Maybe I just set the bar too high for myself and cannot reach it with my current abilities.
Maybe I’ve been at this long enough and I’ll never get any better than I am now.
Maybe I have a wrong idea of what a good picture is like in the first place.
Maybe… I’m a perfectionist who is forever doomed to fall short, because perfection by definition is an impossible target.
Or maybe perfection is just semantics and I should stop trying to use those thousand words when I could take one picture instead.
The one picture I will be completely and totally happy with.