The phrase "you should have seen the one that got away" comes from fishing, of course. But it ought to come from photography.
When I recommenced photographing regularly this past Fall, I got fish-slapped by something I knew but had almost forgotten: to photograph is to get pictures, but it's also to miss pictures. Every day I go out, I return with a mental list of the ones I missed. Sometimes there are none, but often there are two or three.
Those misses get burned into my brain. I have a very visual memory. When I think of a person, I used to worry about my memory because of the lengthening amount of time it was taking the name to come to mind. But then I realize that I can recall the face instantly. So there's nothing wrong with my memory: it's just that it's the visuals that come to me first. Being very honest, I can remember missed pictures from decades ago, a few of them anyway, and still see them in my mind's eye.
I'll give you just a few examples from recent outings:
One*: I'm at the Tractor Supply, and the woman ahead of me, who is also buying dog food, is talking to the clerk. Like a lonely old man, which I imitate sometimes, I butt into the conversation, and she immediately engages, and we trade pleasantries about our dogs. Then I notice husband, standing off a few steps, looking glum, irritated, resentful and bored, and giving me a bit of the stinkeye for chatting up his woman. (Or so I imagine.) Cut to the parking lot: their German Shepherd is sitting in the driver's seat of their dark silver pickup truck, illuminated gorgeously by the setting sun. All I had to do was ask; the worse that could happen would have been a refusal, and that's no big deal. The camera was right on the passenger seat of my car one parking spot away. But because of the husband's attitude I thought, naw. Result: potential picture of perfectly lit German Shepherd in the truck cab looking anxiously back at his masters, in tones perfectly suited to B&W, is burned on my brain, taunting me (still, and it's been a few months now).
Two: On another dog walk, it was too dark to take the camera. Dusk. On the way back I hear voices on the lake, and when I got a view between two houses I see: opposite shore, black; foreground objects, silhouetted; the water of the lake, bright with the reflection of the darkening sky; and, set in a perfect composition, is a bass boat with the motor off, one fisherman standing at the bow with his line in the water, a second one standing by the motor with his line in the water as well, all pretty much silhouetted. All of it a perfectly composed picture just staring at me. It would have taken some effort to get the shot; I would have had to find something to loop the leash to, would have had to trespass on an absent neighbor's lake frontage, which I'm not above doing occasionally when the houses are empty; and I would have had to ask the fishermens' permission, because they were close enough to the shore to talk to. I don't know if I could have brought it all together. But maybe. A potential catch that got away.
Three: Just two days ago. It's been one of those dreadful winter days, dark, wet, all grays and browns and blanketed with oppressive overcast like the world itself is depressed. I'm just driving to town for Chinese food. Why take the camera? It's a decidedly unpromising situation to encounter any photographs. But. The local Mennonites and Amish don't like being photographed, so I don't photograph them. But I'm not above getting a picture of a horse and buggy when the opportunity arises, as long as the people inside aren't featured. I've got a lot of desultory tries littering various folders, but no standout picture yet. So what do I see that night? An empty Mennonite buggy with a gaunt horse standing motionless in a parking lot by the lake. I just glanced at it on the way by, but as the car passes all the elements snap magically into visual arrangement and bam, there's the picture, just waiting. Eminently gettable. All I would have had to do was pull over. There was no one around. I would have offended no one.
Four: When I had just had the loaner Sigma for a few weeks, I was going out to walk to dog on a beautiful evening, and I almost took the camera with me. I argued with myself: it's hard enough to handle the leash; Butters tugs at me when I'm trying to hold the camera still; I've seen the route a million times, and know all the pictures. It's always the same, more or less. So then, not a hundred yards down the road, what do I see but one of the two or three most spectacular skies I've ever seen in the Finger Lakes, which is really saying something. A great dramatic heap of distinctly defined clouds above the opposite shore, lit up all around the rim by the setting sun behind it, with one giant crepuscular ray coming out of one side. It was so stunning I just stood there staring. To add insult, I was passing right by virtually the only spot on my walk where I have blanket permission to walk down to the lake's edge whenever I want to. All I needed was the camera with me and I would have had a picture I would have been proud of for the rest of my life. One of top two or three missed pictures of all time.
The photographer's burden
Damn. You just never know where they are going to come from, and you never know when. There's no guarantee that you would have actually gotten the picture that was there; all you know for sure is that there was a good opportunity there waiting for you, sometimes staring you right in the face. Served me right. Carrying a camera is the photographer's burden. But you gotta do it. Take the camera.
Why don't these picture opportunities appear when I'm not actively engaged in photographing on a near-daily basis? I don't know, but that's the way it is for me. Once I start actively photographing again, they start to appear here and there. And—I'll just speak for myself—I know the best of the ones that got away are going to live on in my visual memory, sometimes for a long time.
Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page
*The TypePad compositor is very irritating when it comes to numbering things. If I type "1.", it immediately thinks I want to go into list mode, and supplies a "2." at the beginning of the next paragraph as soon as I hit return. There's actually a whole column in this: many, many modern interfaces add intrusive "helper" features just because they can, forgetting that control is actually more satisfying than being "helped" when you haven't @#$%! asked for help. Spellcheck gone awry is only the most common example of this. I say: stop helping, and give me control.
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Featured Comments from:
Len Salem (partial comment): "The counterpart of 'the one that got away' is the one that serendipitously happens. Many years ago I was on holiday in Los Angeles, exploring with my then film camera. I saw a warehouse in a commercial district painted pink and standing out against a blue sky. In the UK no one ever painted warehouses pink. So I started taking a few photographs of it from different angles when I saw, out of the corner of my eye and about to come into frame, a jogger wearing a T-shirt in the exact same shade of pink as the warehouse. I waited a second or two and got that image. I would share it here but it is still in storage after a recent move and being pre-digital it is not on my computer. But I feel that photo was gifted to me somehow by a benign photo god."
John Krumm: "This is indeed a good sign that you are getting thoroughly back into photography. I have to tell myself to leave the camera home sometimes, because I'm doing something with my wife, and I want to be mentally present, but the occasional lost image flicks by. And think about all the lost images you never see, all the walks you skipped, early morning treks you passed on, country drives you canceled, and unexplored roads you drove by, eager to get home. As much as having the camera with you, you also have to be out there in the first place."
Mike Peters: "Wear your camera every day, every time you leave the house. In the winter or if it's raining, it's always under my coat. In the summer it's just there. I haven't left the house without a camera since the '80s. Most times I never use it, but when I see something, it's always there."
xf mj (partial comment): "The tension between dog walks vs. photo walks: I hear ya, Mike. I have tried so many elaborate leashing arrangements, while I attempt to hold the camera still for a shot, to somehow keep my tugging dog tethered and out of trouble. None of them really work, because sir Rocco always interrupts my composing somehow, or at least threatens to, and that distracts me from getting the shot and even just hunting the shot. Instead I'll hastily take pictures just to prove that 'Ha ha ha, Rocco, you didn't foil that one!' even when in reality the picture is just a tosser because of my haste. Of course I gotta be grateful to him because he is what gets me out of the house most times, especially in the dead of winter."
David Zalaznik: "Hi Mike, enjoyed the post. Your comment about asking permission of the fishermen struck me as something that I have rarely done beforehand. My goal has always been serendipitous moments and stopping to ask permission all too often would change the situation from what brought me to that moment. I start taking the pictures and, if they become aware of me working, I will stop for a moment, smile or wave and hold up the camera and go back to shooting.And I always take the time to talk afterward. I can think of only a handful of times in a 35-year career in photojournalism that the subject had an issue. Now, the clarification to that is I would take the photo only if I am on public property. And that goes for the Amish as well. They have a constitutional right to practice their religion and I have a constitutional right to practice my craft."
hugh crawford: "The mind is basically a camera, so they don’t really quite get away. My favorite film scene on that topic."
Dan Khong: "It is OK to miss a shot. For as long as there is still breath in our bodies, there will always be other opportunities."
Raymond Lee: "My father came to Hong Kong empty handed at the age of 12. His first job was an assistant store keeper for a rich family which had a son who spent money on photography. It's 1950. He ended up learning photography and darkroom techniques.
"Fast forward many years and I was 10, maybe 12, and I learned from him the basics. It's the early '70s.
"I didn't end up a photographer. (Nor did my father.) But I have been taking pictures since then. I like looking back at them. They remind me of occasions that I might have forgotten, or not, but they let me savour those moments.
"But I remember at one stage, probably towards the end of when film was mainstream, maybe around the mid-'90s, I made a comment to a friend while she was showing me around in Shanghai (where I visited for work): she asked, do you want to take a picture of this (some historical building)? And I said, I'd rather spend time looking at it and capture it in my brain. I did. I still remember that exact moment, and that exact scene, although the rapid changes in the city must have made it unrecognizable by now.
"So, my point is, if I can capture a moment with a camera, I'll do so. But at the same time, I always slow down to try very hard to impress the image in my brain. That way, if I missed a shot, there's a backup somewhere in my head—although theses days, in my 60s, memory is less reliable than early days floppy discs."
