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The perfect is the enemy of the good...

Are you stuck on a plateau? The "plateau-trap" refers to reaching a stage where you are not improving your capabilities as a photographer. Even worse is regressing towards more mediocre results.

There are many ideas which can help you avoid the "plateau trap".

Keep records

Photographers hate record keeping. You can make it much easier by getting a tiny tape recorder and using it to record your notes and activities. For less money, you can create a workbook of notes recording your efforts.

Error analysis

Error analysis is something most photographers _don't_ do. Facing your mistakes can be painful. But it can be very useful and profitable too. The idea is to figure out why you have so many rejects (we all have more than we think is justified ;-).

For example, suppose a number of your shots are not sharp. Why? Are they out of focus, perhaps due to failing eyesight? low light levels? Are they unsharp due to camera movement? Wrong shutter speed to freeze motion?

Challenges

One of my favorite challenges is to take a lens and go do some photographs by using that lens in as many different ways as possible on a roll of film. Having just one lens forces you to focus on issues you might otherwise avoid if you had a full kit of lenses along.

You may be amazed to find out how versatile that 24mm lens can be. The close focusing distance is amazingly close. Macro photography is readily possible, with interesting effects from massive depth of field being available. An extension tube can transform many lenses into the macro-range, as can a low weight lens reversing ring. Many photographers are now using a 24mm lens as an "in your face" street portraiture lens. With care, you can make full-body shots and others which are hard to tell from more normal focal length lens portraits (hint: bubble level for horizon).

From Contax Mailing List:
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000
From: "Bob Shell" bob@bobshell.com
Subject: Re: [CONTAX] Shots of Yellowstone

One other thing I learned. Except for total disasters I don't throw any photos away. Some images I didn't like ten years ago may set me on fire today. I may get a call for images and remember some I didn't consider much of a success and dig them out of the files and the client thinks they are perfect. Today I'm very glad I had that policy since I can now use Photoshop to fix problems in older images which were impossible to fix when they were shot. Some of the ones I did throw away could probably be saved if I still had them.

My office is mostly filing cabinets as a result of this "never throw anything away" attitude.

Bob

...

>I try not to count all the slides that go "kerplunk" into
>the wastebasket when I get that "much awaited" roll back, but sometimes it's
>quite disheartening.