In the Bin

One of the things I don’t see that often on photography sites are all the photos that don’t make it. I think out of 20 or 30 shots I take there’s one that I think is worth editing and sharing. If you’re a photographer reading this, I’d love to hear your experience with this (you can leave a comment below if you like).

There are some days where nothing really works and that’s ok. I take my camera with me almost all the time and you never know when a picture will present itself. Below are some pictures I took on my lunch break. I was walking with a co-worker and we stumbled across this strike march.

I saw professional photographers following them around and taking shots and I guess I picked up my camera because I didn’t want to miss out. To be honest, there wasn’t really a shot that spoke to me and as you can see, these are pretty uninteresting photos. The protesters blend into the background and there’s not really a subject to draw your attention into the photo.

Realising I needed a subject in the foreground, I tried to reframe and wait for anyone who wasn’t in the march to walk into frame. This person above in the vest blends into the background and I think it still too far away. Same with the photo below.

I definitely felt removed from the scene and I think part of the reason was because I feel obliged to take some photos. When I walk around this area of Vancouver, there are usually a lot of tourists taking photos. If there’s more than one person taking a photo of the same thing, it usually draws a crowd and everyone starts pointing their phones and cameras at whatever it is. This definitely happened with the march. Seeing photographers taking photos made me think I ‘should’ take photos of this, when honestly, I wouldn’t have found this sort of thing interesting on my own.

The last photo of the march I was trying to be clever with the sign pointing one way and the crowd walking the other way. There was also an arrow on the ground but I didn’t really compose this image in a way that tied them together. Also, there’s someone on the right walking into the frame. If I had waited a bit, I think I could have gotten them between the two arrows. Maybe that would have made a slightly more interesting photos? Again, I think everything here is just sort of washed into the background. I could have stepped closer to the sign and framed it differently, but I can tell looking back at these photos, I just wasn't that interested in taking photos of this.

Mostly out of frustration and annoyance that none of the shots of the crowd worked, I tried to take a photo of someone’s reflection in a moving bus. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the windows on the other side of the bus were very light and the person’s reflection gets lost. You can kind of see their legs below the red box.

And then there are always a handful of these shots every time I shoot. Looking at these, I often think to myself “What was I thinking?”. I probably saw some interesting light or something but didn’t turn out.

It was at this point I realised I was just shooting anything and tried to step back a bit. The last set of photos I took were of this stretch of puddle water along an overpass. I don’t think I got the image I wanted on the day, but it was interesting enough to me to go back the next day and take some more time.

Looking back, I didn’t get a shot I was happy with, but ultimately I learned something. Just because someone tells you something is interesting doesn’t mean you need to find it interesting!