Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Mastery

Image Quality
As photographers, we often obsess over image quality. The highest resolution, the sharpest focus, the best light, the best composition. All these things are important, but is that really what defines image quality?
Technical perfection
Photography is more closely tied to technology than most other 2-dimensional art forms. Our cameras embody sophisticated technology. Our editing tools are leading edge, sometimes AI driven.
The field seems obsessed with specifications and details. What is the MTF of this lens? Does this sensor have 14 bits of dynamic range or only 12? Should I go to a 100 MPixel medium format system to be a better photographer?
I have chased all of this at times, and I still have that tendency. A couple of times recently I have gone through the specs and lens choices for medium format, longing for a move up to the “better” gear.
Underlying all this is the belief that better technology will give us better image quality. But a more technically perfect image is not necessarily a better one.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Composition rules
The visual arts seem to accumulate a large set of rules meant to guide our work. These are generally sound principles, based on long history of practice and evaluation. Most of them are good, except for the “rule” part.
The “rule of thirds”, for instance, helps balance compositions and give some dynamic life to an image. Same for rules like leading lines or diagonals or don’t center the subject. All are good advice to keep in mind. The problem comes when it becomes an absolute rule. When a gallery or a photo club judge rejects our photo because it did not conform to one of the standard composition rules, then we are in the wrong place.
Know and use the rules, and understand that you can freely “break” them whenever you feel you need to. Guidance like these “rules” are good general advice. But general advice does not apply to each individual case. You are the artist. Your decisions create the image. Trust your intuition.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Work the scene
Other advice I have heard recently is to work the scene to develop it into the best shot. We are counseled to take many exposures from different angles and maybe with different lenses, with the objective that by shooting all this variety, one of the shots will be “best”.
It is probably true that one will be best, but is this the best, or only way, to get there? Let’s work through a scenario. Say I am there with lenses of 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 70mm, 100mm, and 200mm (full frame equivalent). Let’s further say that that I have access to shoot front left from ground level, center above ground level, front right at eye level, and rear center at ground level. Just those individual choices give 24 shots to take. Then throw in bracketing for aperture and exposure and composition and that gives possibly hundreds of shots. For one scene.
It is true that if you do that, you may occasionally be surprised by the one you select as best. It is a great learning exercise if you are developing your style and vision. And a good exercise to go through occasionally to check yourself.
But I generally know what I want. I have the experience of shooting and viewing hundreds of thousands of images. My preferences are established, but flexible. That is, I experiment frequently so as not to fall into a rut. But I do not need to shoot hundreds of frames of one scene to get to what I would consider “best”.
And ever worse, I fear that blindly following this “work the scene” advice will lead to the best possible shot of a mediocre scene. Meanwhile, we miss the better, more imaginative, more creative scene because we were over-concentrating on one thing. I prefer to use my judgment to frame the best shot and go on to find the next, even better one.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Disappointment?
I have done all of these. For years I chased technical perfection. During my time in a camera club, I faithfully followed the composition rules. I shamefully confess that as a judge I criticized some images for not following the rules. And at times I have ended up with piles of images bracketing one scene to insensibility. Usually with the result that I kept one of the first ones I shot and threw the rest away.
Many of these efforts led to technically good images that are lifeless and disappointing. They do not capture my reaction or relationship to the scene. There is no depth of insight. Only a very small fraction are printed and hanging on my wall now.
I have had to completely rethink what “image quality” means.
Image quality
These observations are strictly my personal judgments. I have no authority over your artistic values. As artists, we each should come to our own conclusions.
I have seen that many of the famous photos and paintings in history are not technically perfect. But something about them elevates them above the crowd. What is that? I know I have images shot with inferior cameras with cheap lenses that are “better” than many taken with much better cameras. This makes me wonder what image quality really means.
Now days, we are inundated with images. Most are adequately sharp and well exposed. What makes one stand out among those trillions of bits of noise?
We must reevaluate what it means to be a good image. It is no longer the obscurity of the location or the difficulty of the shot or the perfect composition or the sharp detail. None of those are enough, by themselves, to make an outstanding shot. In a Substack article, Lee Anne White said: “There are always photographs that are technically solid, but missing that something extra“. Ah, that something extra is so hard to describe.
Photography is a craft as well as an art. We must strive to do an excellent job of technical perfection, composition, etc. But those things are not the something extra that make an outstanding image.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Something extra
In the crowded and noisy world of images, it seems that what we look to now is an emotional attachment. Something must touch us personally. To do that, it generally had to touch the artist, too. We must be able to let our emotional reaction to the scene come through our image.
Maybe this is what Cartier-Bresson meant by the decisive moment. Perhaps this is what Jay Maisel means by the gesture of something. Either way, an idea is that the subject is expressing something. We must be in sync with it and ready and able to capture the best expression of that.
These instances sometimes happen in a fleeting moment. Perhaps we can anticipate them and be setup and prepared. Sometimes it is a singular event, and we have one shot at it. But either way, we must recognize and react. We must understand what is happening and be mentally and physically prepared to capture it.
And being prepared involves understanding our emotional involvement with what it is. We must recognize when that gesture is best expressed to us, and pounce on it.
Of course, images do not have to be of a fleeting moment to be good and express an amazing gesture. There are those that are static scenes, where you can linger over it to wait for the right light or weather.
Still, what the viewer relates to is your feeling about it. Why did you take this picture? Why did you select it out of all the others?
Paraphrasing Jay Maisel: “If the thing you’re shooting doesn’t excite you, what makes you think it will excite anyone else?”
If an image meant something special to me, and I can capture that and make you feel what I felt, then there is a chance the image is meaningful to you, too. That it embodies the “something extra.” Isn’t this what image quality is about?
November 19, 2025
How Did You Think of That?
Most of us are not limited by our knowledge or our equipment or our environment. We are limited by the boundaries we place on our imagination. The question is not “how did you do that?”. It is “how did you think of that?”
Self-limiting
Maybe it is harsh to say we limit ourselves. But I have come to believe it.
I have gotten a lot from a quote from my friend Cole Thompson:
Many photographers will see an image they admire and ask: how did you do that? They want to know the techniques used, thinking that once they know those, they could create that image.
The question they should be asking is: how did you think of that?
Do we tend to follow what other people do, or do we create our own path? I believe we are afraid because we are not confident in our own creativity. It is safer to imitate.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Equipment
There are many excuses for our perceived limitations. One easy one is that my equipment is not good enough.
Photographers seem to lust for new equipment. If I had a medium format camera I could … That new super zoom lens would let me …
I understand. I have equipment lust like anyone. But on the other hand, I have come to believe that if you hand a Brownie box camera to a good artist, they will make good images. They will embrace the limitations and use them as part of the art.
This tells me that, in general, equipment is not the fundamental limitation. There may be specific situations that require certain technology, but artistry is independent of technology.
So, I don’t think I can use the excuse of not having good enough equipment. What I have is perfectly adequate to make art. I just must learn how.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Knowledge
Learning how brings up the excuse of not enough knowledge. I understand. I am a constant learner. Almost everyday beings a new video or article or book I consume to learn to be better. I have hundreds of hours of videos and a library of books. Photography is more closely aligned to technology than most other arts, and it is supported by huge amounts of training material.
But I also know this can become a crutch and an excuse. When will you get to the magic threshold of knowledge required to be an artist? Sometimes needing more study becomes an excuse for being afraid to go out and do it.
Again, I know. I’m talking to myself, too. I get caught up in this. Today I watched a presentation on photographic abstraction, including techniques for in-camera multiple exposure and intentional camera movement. It was educational and motivating. But I didn’t immediately go out and apply it. And if I was not an artist before seeing it, I still could not call myself one after it. Maybe the amount of raw knowledge is not the key. We do not become an artist by a certain amount of training or a degree or certificate.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a strong believer in learning. Our tools are complex. And I believe that the more examples and points of views we have seen gives us greater fluency with our art. But as an artist, the knowledge must be internalized, then re-expressed in our vision. If we are studying but not doing it, we are not making art.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Environment
I get stimulated and energized by travel. I am lucky in getting the opportunity to take a few trips a year. The places and things I see while traveling seem newer and more interesting than the stuff where I live.
But travel is a bonus, an extra stimulation. The reality is that I spend most of my time around home. I must discipline myself to see the ordinary things around me with fresh eyes.
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling like you can’t make any interesting images because you do not have the chance to travel to exotic locations. Great photo opportunities are everywhere if we learn to see them. This is the type of mindfulness I recommend. The ability to see the ordinary with fresh eyes.
I live in a relatively small town along the Colorado front range. But I seldom go into the mountains. Almost every day, though, I go out for a few miles walk starting from my studio. I try to vary my routes, but there are only so many directions I can go.
This means I see the same areas frequently. Finding something interesting that I haven’t seen before or that looks fresh and different is a challenge. But it is a challenge I have accepted as a test of my creativity. I have been doing this for years and I can still find engaging things.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Imagination
This may seem to have wandered far from the question of “how did you think of that?” My point is that our art is not limited by our equipment or our training or our environment. Our limitation is our imagination. Can we look at something that everybody sees all the time and see it different? Can we think something new?
That is a problem, but it is a good problem. If the limitation is in our head, we have some control of it and can fix it. Or at least make it better.
I believe an important step is reclaiming the curiosity we had as kids. Remember that curiosity you had, or your kids had? Why is the sky blue? What is the moon made of? In the olden days, was everything black and white?
Curiosity like this leads to asking “what if?” questions and to looking at the world different. We can begin to think of new ways to photograph, new ways to see things. The same thing we have always seen may be perceived in a new way. Answering the questions is less important than that we were able to ask them. The questions challenge us to look again and deeper.
So, maybe, to be a better photographer, I don’t need the latest equipment (bummer), or more training, or a trip to New Zealand. Maybe I just need to re-learn how to ask interesting questions. To be curious about everything. And to not be afraid to ask ourself “what would happen if…?”
Try it. Be a kid. Follow your curiosity. Make mistakes and enjoy them. Don’t imitate other people. Create something no one else has ever seen.
As the great Jay Maisel said: If you want to make more interesting pictures, become a more interesting person.
November 12, 2025
Post Exploration
We focus a lot on the process of taking pictures. And rightly. But the world of post processing is another rich opportunity for “making” images.
Taking pictures
When we think about photography, we think about taking pictures. After all, that is what photography is, isn’t it? That is where we capture the data that becomes the final image. For many, the thinking stops there. Click – picture.
Maybe crop it a little, or remove a distraction. Perhaps work on the overall color. But the picture is the picture. No reason to make many changes.
Many people, especially some “serious” photographers, feel that the image should be made whole and complete in the camera. Anything other than simple edits that make no substantive changes to the original image is suspect or forbidden. That is their opinion, and they are welcome to it, so long as they do not try to bind it on me.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Post processing
But for other photographers, the world of post processing is much larger than that. Yes, there is cropping and distraction removal and some color tweaks, but those are just the basic first steps.
I will go out on a limb and say that post processing is as large and important a skill as is capturing images. The world of digital imaging has thrown us into a situation where what happens after the shutter press can be as important as what happens leading up to it. And our tools have become far more powerful, enabling “darkroom” processing far beyond what any film shooter ever dreamed of. It would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
I assume you shoot RAW images. There are times to shoot jpg, but those are rare in my world of fine art photography. But RAW images require extensive editing. They look bland right out of the camera, since they did not go through heavy-handed jpg processing that is trying to make a best guess of what we wanted.
Just enhancing
After that initial round of basic edits, we get more serious for the images we pull out to work up. Now we probably do some initial sharpening. Then set overall contrast, black & white points, maybe some clarity to punch it up some more.
At this point the image is starting to take shape. Now I may spend a lot of time working on tonal gradations. Basically working on the details of lighting and separating element so they can be seen more clearly. Then there is working on global saturation and luminance and maybe even hue of individual colors.
We may decide to add a vignette to help focus attention on the subject. Perhaps we will use color grading or profiles to change the overall “look” of the image. Maybe so far as going to black & white.
There are so many more. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We can easily spend hours on one image doing these and many more. I have watched hundreds of hours of tutorial videos describing techniques for doing these things. Really getting in depth on Lightroom Classic or, especially, Photoshop is a project requiring years. And they are moving targets.
But at this point, we have a nicely corrected image – that is still basically the original photograph. It may be exactly the scene as we remember it, or it may have a color wash, or even be in black & white, but it is the same photograph.
Again, this is where another large group of photographers stop.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Permission to play
And that’s where I stop with most of my images. But there are other doors to open that can lead to new destinations.
Here is a statement of belief for me: pixels are raw material. They are just pieces of data saved on your computer. They do not “mean” anything except for the meaning we ascribe to them when we view them all together as an image. This is my belief. but since it is not based on laws or regulations or fundamentals of nature, it is just my belief. Feel free to disagree and act accordingly.
But since this is my belief, I am free to do anything I want with my data. There is nothing like PETA for protecting against the abuse of pixels.
I give myself unlimited permission to play with my data. And I do, to degrees. The problem is that it is hard to break away from old habits and beliefs. Too often, I am trapped by my limited thinking. I see an image. I don’t always see what those pixels could become. That, more than camera resolution or tools or computer power, limits what I make.
Permission to play does not mean I will always take advantage of my freedom. I am self-limited. My actions don’t always follow my beliefs. But I’m trying to break my mental barriers.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Making new images
I love compositing, combining 2 or more images to make something new. It is a joy when I can take 2 dissimilar images and make something different from either. Sometimes I put together 3,4, 10 images. The resulting image may only have bits and pieces of each source file. Did you know that a TIFF file has a maximum size of 4G Bytes? After that you must bump up to the PSB format. Quite a few of my experimental images do that.
And I love taking an image and processing it with different textures or digital effects to create a very different look. So much so that sometimes when I am out shooting, I mainly shoot textures. I have a good library of them.
And have you played with some of the interesting Photoshop filters that are built in? Quite a variety of tools for blur, rendering, warp, landscape mixer, distort, stylize, etc. I can experiment for hours in Photoshop trying new combinations of things.
Some actually create results I like. But you never know until you try.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
The digital world
My point is that our “photo opportunities” do not stop when we press the shutter. Capturing a good image is very important. But there are endless possibilities for improving it or totally changing it in post processing. Sometimes we see opportunities for doing more than just making an image look better. Post processing is another creative outlet.
Digital images are much more malleable than film. Pixels are just data. Data can be processed. There is a world of opportunity in the post processing, if we can break out of our limited view of what can and should be done to our pixels. I call it post exploration.
If you are a fine art photographer, the ethical choice is to do your best, most creative work. Not to protect pixels.
October 29, 2025
Run & Gun
There are arguments for working slowly and carefully. But there are times when we must be fast and in automatic reaction mode. There is no one-size-fits-all in photography. Sometimes the best choice, or your only choice, is run & gun.
What is run & gun
I doubt there are any hard definitions of this, but by run & gun I mean shooting fast and without prior planning. It is working fluidly, rapidly, instinctively, without setups or lots of takes. Some would call it “fast and loose.”
This is often constrained by external circumstances. The. idea comes to mind for me because I just got back from a vacation in Europe where I was put in exactly this situation on most of the tours I did. These were not specific photo tours. Rather, one where the guide says, “here is the Strasbourg Cathedral; go in and look around and meet back here in 15 minutes.” Gulp. No planning, no chance to work the scene, no bracketing, not even a tripod. I have never even seen this place before and do not know what to expect, other than that it is one of the tallest churches in the world.
Other situations where this is necessary are sports photography, concert photography, or candid wedding photography. All are places where we cannot control the action or pose the subjects.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for slow
It’s easy to argue the merits of shooting slow. We have time to contemplate, to consider options. To walk around and look at different angles. Maybe to wait for better light.
This is the kind of shooting Ansel Adams or John Fielder would do. When you are carrying heavy, large format cameras way out into the field and exposing expensive film plates, it imposes a discipline on you.
You would always use a tripod (necessary for slow film anyway). You would compose carefully and thoughtfully. Exposures would be calculated in detail, maybe using the Zone System to make sure all the tones are captured and placed where you can do the darkroom work you want later.
In slow shooting you may go out for a day of shooting and come back with a dozen or so exposed images. But each is very carefully considered.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for working a scene
On the other hand, in Light, Space, and Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity, (I get no consideration for the reference) David duChemin argues eloquently for working a scene thoroughly. That is, to shoot your first instinct, then to move and shoot more, look at it from different angles, try to refine your idea and improve on what you did.
He says that, when teaching workshops, if a student says they are not happy with their work, he scans through their images on their camera. He is not looking for technique but for the number of frames they shot of it. His point is that if the student shot 3 images of something and then stopped, they did not explore the possibilities adequately.
I believe most photographers would improve their work if they did this. Most of us shoot digital now, so we are not limited by the cost or bulk of film. We can review our images immediately on the camera. This quick feedback can help, especially if we are learning composition and camera technique.
It is amazing how even a slight movement or re-framing can make a huge difference in the impact of an image. Having the time and self-discipline to do this can be beneficial.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for shooting less
On yet another hand, I just read an article by a friend, Dean Allen, arguing that we should shoot less. His is a minimalist argument. The burden of sifting through all those excess images we shoot to find the few good ones is time consuming. It is hard to find the needles in the haystack.
Doing this would certainly save a lot of time culling and editing. I think most photographers would rather be out making images instead of sitting at the computer. So yes, in this sense, fewer is better.
It sounds attractive to say to only shoot the good ones, but I would counter that it is very hard to tell at the time which one will be the best.
But when that doesn’t work
There are situations where one of these disciplined approaches can’t be used effectively. I mentioned being on a tour with limited time to see a spectacular location. There are others.
My nature is that I do not like to perturb a situation to set up a shot. Whether that is on a tour in a cathedral or at a sports event or a family gathering or doing street photography, I prefer to accept what I find then use my skill and experience to be able to get a good image.
This is a basic conflict with my wife. She thinks good pictures of people have them lined up in front of whatever the scene is, staring at the camera, with big smiles on their faces. I would never do this. To me the shot to work for is a candid capture that reveals someone’s personality or thoughts or feelings. One that shows them doing something natural and characteristic.
Not trying to control the situation is a healthy acceptance of reality. And an opportunity for creativity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Skill and reflexes
Sometimes you must shoot fast and instinctively. There is no opportunity for planning or even thinking much. The run & gun approach. This is a learned skill. One that I enjoy working on.
To me this is a kind of dance between me and the subject. They are moving or doing whatever they do, and I have to be in sync with them, to anticipate the movement, to recognize the right composition and moment and be ready to react instantly.
It would be nice at times to be able to spend time to move and re-frame and shoot lots of trials, but that is usually not an option in this style of shooting. I find that I am in reaction mode. That is not bad. It is a kind of hunting, where I have a general idea of what I want, and I am patiently looking and waiting for the situation or composition to develop, then I must recognize it and act fast.
It is a rush of adrenaline and satisfaction when I press the shutter and know I have captured a good image.
One way to practice this is to go to a High School football game. Decide what the interest is to you – the action on the field, the sidelines, the cheerleaders, the fans – and to concentrate on that.
If you have kids or grandkids, they are a rich opportunity. They will be comfortable enough with you around that they will ignore you and go about their play.
Using a camera is the best practice, because you are working with the actual framing and exposure and lighting and people. And the get the real feedback to see how you did.
But sometimes in these situations, I simulate it. That is, I imagine I am using a certain focal length lens, I try to visualize the composition as the camera would see it, then think “click” when I would press the shutter. It is good practice for reacting, but you do not get the feedback of seeing actual results.
Expect lots of bad pictures until you get the timing and reflexes. Don’t be discouraged when good results do not come fast. Keep on learning and practicing. Even after a lot of practice, do not expect the same percentage of keepers you normally get.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Adapt to the situation
I do not believe there is a single right approach to photography, unless you are a commercial photographer in a narrow product niche. Different situations present different opportunities and challenges. It is good to practice approaching scenes from a variety of perspectives and with different skill sets.
Shooting in a run & gun manner is right for some times. And there is a certain wild exuberance from shooting this way. Especially if you are comfortable with it and you have practiced enough to have a good success rate. It is one of my preferred ways to work.
I love the challenge of taking things as I find them and seeing what I can make of them. In some situations, it may be the only way to shoot.
Try it. You may love it.
September 10, 2025
That Didn’t Work
You had an idea. You tried for it, but the result must be considered a failure. If that didn’t work, what do you do? Does that mean you are a bad artist?
An idea
You get an idea of something you want to try. Call it an inspiration if you will. More likely it is an extension of what you have done before, maybe applied to a new subject or situation.
As an artist, most of our work begins with an idea. As a photographer, we than follow up the idea with trying to realize it as an image. Maybe several, working different positions, lenses, shutter speeds, etc. to try to optimize the resultant image.
If you are very experienced with your craft, you might be able to visualize fairly accurately what the result will be. But no matter how experienced you are, you will get surprises. Surprises can be fun and a great creativity boost.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Fail
But whether you blast away 100 frames or selectively shoot 1 frame of a scene, you will sometimes look at the result and say it was a fail. How we react to such a failure is very important. Your reaction could ultimately determine the level of success you have later.
I’m using the idea of failing, but what does that mean? The definition will be different for each of us, but in general, I hope we can agree that it means the result does not meet our expectation. It does not necessarily mean the image is terrible or unusable, or even bad, but what we planned or pre-visualized did not happen.
At the risk of sounding like a cliché, this is a learning opportunity.©Ed Schlotzhauer
Permission to fail
Failure seems like a terrible fault to some of us. I am one of those in many things, but not in my photography. For my art, I have given myself not only permission to “fail”, but the expectation that I will and should. I have embraced failure as a healthy part of growing as an artist.
This was a big step for me. I discovered that the fact of failure was not the main problem. The larger problem was fear of failure.
How much are we held back in our art by fear of failure? Do we fear being humiliated? Or that people will dismiss us as an untalented lightweight? Do we believe we are somehow bad when a shot does not meet our expectation?
Here’s the reality: few people care about what we do. They are not sitting around thinking about us and they take little or no notice of our work. If they’re not fixated on it, why should we be?
We are our main audience. Our work succeeds or fails based on our own perception. All that matters is whether we get to a result we are happy with. Failures along the way should not matter.
Risk
Author Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” I believe the greater risk in our artistic life is to fail to be creative.
AI is constantly learning how to mimic all existing art. The only solution is to be different from what exists.
If we are repeating the same boring stuff that 99% of photographers do, what have we contributed to art or to ourselves? Chasing likes on social media is normalizing. That is, it brings us down to the average level of everyone else.
Theodore Roosevelt said: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.” If we are an artist, the risk is to not give it our full effort and not become what we can be. To let what is within us die because of fear of failure. That seems too great a fate to risk.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Learn, modify, try again
The sports legend Michael Jordan said “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.“
Unlike Michael Jordan, we don’t have millions of fans watching live as we fail. We can curate our work and select what gets presented to people to see. You won’t see my failures, unless I am trying to make a point.
Given that, why should we consider failure a problem? A failure is an experiment. We try something, we see the result, and we like it, or we don’t. Either way we can learn something new and try again. But the reality is, we learn more from failing than from success. But only if we make the effort to figure out the cause.
So, when we’re shooting, we have an idea or a vision of what we want to achieve. We make the image. Later, we examine it closely on our computer. Sometimes the result is far from what we envisioned. That is a time to introspect. To determine what we did or didn’t do that made the result different from what we wanted. Maybe to ask if the result is better or worse than what we visualized.
These days, I find that less of my fails are because of exposure or composition problems. Most are concept-level issues. Ansel Adams said “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Concept failures are harder to diagnose and correct, but they certainly keep me thinking more.
But whatever the cause of our failure, our goal should be to learn, modify, and try again.
Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Sketches
I consider most of my images to be sketches. Things that are helping me work toward an idea I haven’t fully envisioned. When I shot film, these experiments were expensive, and I tried to minimize the loss. Digital frames seem almost free. No problem to take several experimental tries.
So now we should be free to work a scene as much as seems valuable. But I seldom do it that way. My sketches are more tests to see if what I saw can become a good image. Perhaps it is a fault of mine, but I spend little effort making many slight variations of a scene.
I don’t like doing comparison tests of 12 different views of a scene to try to figure out which is best. If I come up with 4 that are equally good, how do I decide a “best”? When I find myself in this situation, I often conclude I am not really applying much creativity to the image. I seem to be optimizing for technical concerns.
A possible exception is shooting intentional camera motion (ICM) images. Each frame could be considered a failure from a purist technical perspective – blurry, motion, no sharp subject. These are fun because it is an abstraction technique, and each frame is unique. For these, I may do a few variations on a scene, trying different motion techniques. You never know exactly what the outcome will be. There are occasional happy surprises.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Discoveries
When we allow ourselves permission to fail, we sometimes discover that we have stumbled onto something entirely new. We see a glimpse of a new creative statement starting to form.
This is a different form of courage in the face of failure. The recognition that yes, we failed in what we tried, but it opened a new insight on our world. The first emergence of this new idea is probably crude. It seems like a failure. But as we reflect on why we are drawn to it, why we do not immediately delete it, it may give new insight to change our viewpoint and try to perfect it.
This is one of those rare and exciting moments when we get a tingling in our spine and we perk up and wonder what just happened here? That is a cue that we are about to step outside our comfort zone. It is dangerous for an artist to be too comfortable for too long.
That is creativity. Sometimes creativity is based on recognizing that what I did didn’t work, but I now see a glimpse of something better. Being an artist is a process, not a destination. Failure can be an opportunity to advance ourselves to a better state. Analyze it, experiment, modify, try again to see if you are going in a good direction.
Sometimes, finding “that didn’t work” could mean we are on the brink of an exciting new step in our art.
August 20, 2025