 In the modern world, there seems to be this obsession, and I'm going to use the word obsession because I think it's the right one, with this idea of improving a keeper rate. So this is the rate of photographs that one deems worthy of keeping from a session. Now, of course, it is a noble pursuit, and it's certainly a worthy pursuit, to improve our photography, to increase the consistency with which we take good photographs. It's not a new concept. It's been around for as long as people have been taking photographs. However, what is new is this ability that we have in certainly the digital world to permanently and instantly erase our photographs, our mistakes, if you want to call them that. How's it? How's it? I get it. I understand that improving your photography by improving your keeper rate is a useful metric. It's something that people can use as a way of measuring how much they have grown as a photographer. However, discarding photographs without any sort of real consideration, and by thinking about photography in terms of the single image, is depriving us of what Minor White called the things I have not seen until now. Of course, none of this can happen, though, if you delete your photographs in the first place. So the very first thing that I'd like you to do is from now on, do not delete any photographs from any of your sessions. Keep them, archive them, and they're there for you to use using this process that we're going to look at now. So how do you unearth these nuggets of gold that Minor White is talking about? Like so many things, it comes down to a processor, a three-step process, or it's not technically a three-step, but three steps sounds nice, so let's run with it. In Minor White's day, most people, I think the majority of people, photographed with very few frames in their camera, a limited amount of film stock. And so he implores us to photograph with consideration with the miniature camera, and obviously in these days we have thousands of frames at our disposal in each session. And of course, this is lies the problem, because we have so much, we don't really consider every time that we trip the shutter. So we want to start off by taking consideration to treat each frame that we take with respect. Much like the large format photographers before us, we want to consider the exposures, the compositions to think about what it is that we are photographing before we trip the shutter. By all means, use the ability for speed that you have with modern equipment to photograph rapidly. But don't just machine gun a subject, thinking that frame 500 is going to be different from frame 1, when all you've done is stay in the same place and push the shutter down for three seconds. It doesn't work like that. So that's number one, consider each frame. When you consider each frame, you are going to have a more considered body of work to pan for these gold nuggets. The second aspect is you want to make contact prints. Now that's hardly revolutionary. Woo, make contact prints. What it does do is it makes you look at and consider all your photographs as a whole body of work. When we just flick through them on Lightroom or whatever you use, and you're pulling out the ones that you want to work on, you're not really given quite often too much thought. You just kind of go, that doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. And you dismiss them, you never look at them ever again because they are filtered out of your system. When you make a contact sheet and you can make contact sheets through Lightroom, you have all the photographs there and you can then take your time, look at them as a whole, see which images are starting to surface up, which ones are giving you a little bit of a hint that they contain something else beyond what it is that you thought you were looking for. Look at me talking about software on the photographic eye, but it just goes to show that tools are useful in photography and we shouldn't be luddites about things. We can use things to our advantage all the time. The third point that Minor White brought up was to make flat prints. By this he meant prints that you were making, probably postcard-sized prints, that just had an even tonal range across them that were just a base exposure, no dodging, no burning, nothing that we would call editing in this day and age. Because when you look at the flat print, when you look at a print that's just evenly exposed, you are seeing everything there, nothing is being hidden, nothing is being accentuated. Everything that is there in the photograph is there for the seeing. And this is what we're looking for, we're looking for what are called mechanical discoveries. So these are things that probably would be loosely termed mistakes or failures in today's world. Let's say you were trying to freeze a child running in motion, but something happened and the shutter speed was a bit off and maybe one of the feet were blurred or what have you, and you look at things like that and you go, that is an interesting idea. That has sparked an idea in my mind that is worth exploring, worth trying out in future photographs. Now obviously blurred shutter speed is hardly a revolutionary thing, but I think you get the point. It's a simple illustration of looking for mistakes, mistakes, and not claiming them as your own, but using them as springboards to go in a direction that you would never thought of. Back in the day, mistakes used to happen all the time when you were making a website. However, these days, Squarespace has made it so easy to create a stylish, modern, responsive website without any knowledge of coding needed. It's ideal for people who want to have their own online presence, but we're always scared about the technical know-how that was needed to create a website. They have a simple drag-and-drop building system for the pages. You can add a page from a single click of a button. You can add a photo gallery with as much simplicity as you'd like. For a camera club, there is also the option to have a members-only area where you could sell subscriptions. And indeed, if you wanted to sell your own prints to the worldwide audience, Squarespace have got it all for you. I remember making mistakes about trying to shift a domain to one of my hosting sites in the past, and again, Squarespace have got it all under control. So head on over to Squarespace by clicking on the link below. The Squarespace.com forward slash the photographic icon. You will get a 14-day free trial, plus 10% off of any of your subscriptions when you choose to go live with your website. I said there were like three steps, but there's not a fourth. Fourth, because I love you guys. I don't give you a fourth step. Actually, mind the why it's going to give you a fourth step. There is, I think, just this standard. We do not print our photographs much. I think it's fair to say. As I showed, I think we're missing a trick here by not printing out our work. It doesn't really cost very much. In fact, you can get it for basically nothing. You can get postcard prints made for nothing. Get them printed up, put them on a floor, put them on the wall, move them around. See how they work with each other. It's like creating poetry. Think of your photographs as individual words. Can you put them together to make a poem, to make a song, to make something that is bigger than the individual photographs? When you start doing that, you'll also see patterns in your images. You'll see that there are recurring themes that may not have been obvious to you the first time that you saw the images. Take time to explore and discover the things that are in your photography already there. You don't need to find them always in a book or a tutorial that a thousand other million people have looked at to create photographs that look like everybody else's photo. Do the exploring in your own photography. It's there. We can be so obsessed in the modern era with getting things right with perfection. And the world would be a very boring place if everything was perfect, if nobody ever made any mistakes. Embrace the mistakes that you make because they're not mistakes. They are, as Bob Ross has said many times and I'm a big fan of Bob Ross, they are happy little accidents that can help you to go in directions you would never have thought of. Think about all the things that we take as cliches today. The blurred shutter speeds, all those sort of things. They originally were mistakes. They were accidents. No doubt when that very first picture of the man having his shoes polished was created, somebody could have looked at it and gone, but it's a mistake. There's a man in your picture. Don't be afraid of mistakes. Don't be afraid of failure. We're too focused in the modern world on perfection and photography isn't about perfection. It's about the process. It's about seeing what happens because not everything is under our control. In the modern world we are constantly trying to control the uncontrollable and it's a detrimental to our photography, to our creative endeavors because we are blocking off the very things that fuel creativity and that is seeing what happens. Seeing what happens when we embrace the mistake, when we see the opportunities that the camera is giving to us, that it's showing us. Take them, seize them with both hands, put them into your photography, experiment with them. Have fun with it because photography is about fun. It's about experimentation. It's about learning to see the world in a way that we don't see it as human beings. If you've enjoyed this talk about embracing mistakes or finding the nuggets of gold in your photography, then I am going to link to a video up here right now that I think is going to be equally enjoyable and that you'll get a lot out of as well.