Missed Opportunities - Part 1

This post was inspired by a missed opportunity today. My daughter was doing the funniest dance to a song that was playing in the background and I went to pickup my camera to get some photos or video.... and of course I hadn't recharged the battery. By the time I looked around for the spare battery she had stopped and funnily enough a one and half year old doesn't always co-operate when you ask them to do something again 😅

It got me thinking about an idea for a post, which then turned into an idea for two posts. This post is going to show some of the times on shoots where I've missed an opportunity for what could have been a potentially good shot. Often its down to cameras missing focus, which may not always be hugely noticeable (especially when scaling the image down for web resolution) but its one of those pet peeves of mine and I wouldn't want anyone seeing a shot of mine where the focus wasn't right. Except in this post where you'll see exactly that 🤣

Sometimes its timing issues or lights not triggering as they should or other equipment malfunctions. In any case they're moments that could have been avoided but in this post I want to share some with you. Also to mention these are without editing too.

In the next post I'm going to go one further and try to select some missed opportunity shots and do what I can to turn them into salvageable shots. That one may be tricky but I'm certainly going to give it a try and share the results so hopefully it goes ok.

So here goes...

I'm not sure if this one will translate as well when the image resolution is scaled down so much. I think this shot of Steph could have been a really nice one with a really strong pose but it just didn't work out. Basically this one was missed in 2 different ways. I had noticed Steph had moved forward here on this shoot so the framing of this is too cropped in close. Also the focus got missed. Its focused in sharp on the front of her top where it has the Tommy Hilfiger name is but unfortunately her face is slightly out of focus, enough for me not to want to use the shot. When I showed Steph the shot she joked that the area in focus was probably where people would be looking anyway 😅

This was from the water shoot I did with Tania. We were both in the lake late at night and incredibly cold so my reaction speed weren't as good as they should have been. This was example of where Tania had been submerged just below water level and jumped out with an epic splash. If my timing had been better this could have been an awesome shot, but instead I just just as she landed and started laughing.

Revenge of the autofocus. One of the hazards about shooting in low light moody conditions is that cameras can sometimes struggle to hit focus on the person in the shot. I used to come across this issue pretty regularly until I switched to my Sony A7R mk 3 camera. There's some magic happening in that camera where it just nails focus nearly all the time. Unfortunately I didn't have that camera when I shot with Mary this time. We shot in a darkly lit hotel room and unfortunately I ended up with a whole lot of shots like this that just weren't in focus enough to use them. We still got a lot that we liked, but it doesn't stop me kicking myself for those missed opportunities.