There's a quote I found on a web page last week, attributed to the famous French photographer Robert Doisneau. I don't know whether the quotation is accurate, but here it is nonetheless:

If I knew how to make a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

It's probably better in French; there is all too often an information loss in translation, whether the original be in French, Ukrainian, or any other language. Sometimes English doesn't cut the mustard.

That quotation speaks to me because I make so many images that just aren't worthwhile: some of the compositions are clumsy, some are out of focus, for some the framing isn't right, there's lots of reasons. My "success" rate, if you'd like to call it that, is probably less than 5%, though I find with larger formats (especially 4x5) my success rate is higher because I slow down and make fewer images. While 5% seems like a low number, it appears that I'm in good company from the reading that I've done. Brooks Jensen of Lenswork Magazine prefers to call the remaining 95% failed experiments rather than (simply) failures. My kind of guy.

One of the reasons that a particular composition doesn't work is that my thinking behind it is muddled, and the composition is too "complex". All of us have taken images like that: the image is a hodge-podge of a bunch of different elements, and to the viewer the picture just doesn't "work". In these examples, to use the parlance of the "recipe", or (perhaps better) the photographic maxims I quoted in an earlier blog post (you know the ones): the picture:

• doesn't have a simple construction,
• has more than one subject,
• has too many distractions,

and so on.

I like to think that problem is really not a technical one, but goes to the heart of matter: that being, what was the photographer thinking/feeling/responding to when she clicked the shutter? There was something in the viewfinder that prompted the photographer to make the image: what was it?

In fact, I think that often the problem is that there are too many things in the viewfinder that prompt the photographer to create the image; in that scenario we rely on the photographer to interpret and isolate the individual elements in the image in order to convey the intended message.

Maybe the song metaphor, as stated by Alex Wilson late last week, is useful here, if only as a reminder. Maybe the image contains multiple songs in different keys that are sung simultaneously.