There’s a wonderful quote by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It goes along the lines of “Your first 10,000 photos are your worst.” This idea reinforces the need for determination. Your photos will be awful, and it will take a while for you to finally get to somewhere you’re happy with. This, obviously, caters to the idea that we should really put forth only our fully finished and finely polished gems. But then, what do we do with the other images? Do we just throw them out? Well, Bresson never threw out his negatives, and curators continue to find ways to showcase them.
Bresson never threw out his negatives, in fact, he barely even ever looked at them. This is much like so many other photographers today.
So what do we do with all the photos that we’ve rejected? There are a few things you can consider:
Why Are They Rejects? A Lesson from Vivian Maier
A while ago, we checked out Vivian Maier’s Unseen Photos exhibit. We concluded that many of the images are probably seen for a reason. They gave us more insight into her mind and how lonely she really was. So ask yourself why the images you’ve made aren’t worth putting out there. Once you’ve identified your own patterns, you can figure out why they really are not your best work.
With Maier, she kept all of her work private. For several years, those in charge of her photographs have really put forward only a handful of scans from the negatives. But as we’ve seen with her photos, sometimes all they needed was a crop.
You can always work to make edits to your images. And even when your edits aren’t sufficient for you, you can still find another way.
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Learn From Your Mistakes With New Eyes
Identify the patterns in your work. Often, I shoot product images and ask myself why one image isn’t making me excited compared to the other. It’s usually something to do with how I feel. There are various factors involved here: the light, the angle, the color, the background, etc.
Here’s a quick challenge: go through 36 images of yours. Find all the rejects, then identify why those images don’t work. When you’re done, tally up what’s wrong with them and incorporate those lessons into how you shoot later on.
Just like Henri Cartier-Bresson joked around to say that sharpness was a stupid concept, you could still find joy in these images.
The Anthony Bourdain Method: Repurpose Them
There’s a famous scene of Anthony Bourdain’s where he takes “bad fish” and repurposes them into a fish stew. It’s really made up of just the fish he didn’t sell the night before. This way he still recovers his money and makes it into something special.
This idea can and should be applied to your photography. Your best images shouldn’t live on social media. They should be on your website in a portfolio that is completely different from your social media pages.
Social media, instead, is where you put the “extra work” to promote the better stuff and make people go to your website to see better work from you.
For many of us, this sounds standard. But you’d be amazed at how many photographers don’t update their websites. We’re sure that there are many of you out there who aren’t updating their websites. And we then ask this question: why aren’t you doing it?