THANKFUL FRIDAY

The outtakes; they are the pictures I did not intend to take. They are the pictures I end up taking while attempting to get a different shot. They are mistakes. These photos are often left behind and discarded before I can even consider editing. Sometimes there are a lot of them just sitting in a holding pattern between maybe and trash. About once a month, I go into my camera app and delete them all. The camera app I use to take pictures is not the in-house camera app and it gives me the option of only storing the ones I plan on keeping directly on my phone. This way my photo album doesn’t get cluttered with a whole bunch of first pancake images.

Yet, these outtake images were the ones that I was drawn to this week. They were the ones that made me tilt my head, raise an eyebrow and think “wait. there might be something here.” The wind blowing the tulip I was focusing in on so that the bloom shifted out of frame seemed more interesting then the straight on shot I was striving to achieve. My attempt to show off my new tulle skirt, a whimsical impulse buy that has turned out to be my new favorite article of clothing, came across as delightfully messy and childish. I haven’t been unhappy with the pictures I had intended to take. Those have been nice, predictable, clean. The outtakes from this week have been a happy surprise, like finding five cookies in a package that was only supposed to have four cookies.

This is the time of year where I crawl out from under the depressive blanket I generally hide myself under during the winter months. I start to feel less like a dried up old husk of a person. Everything around me is beautiful again. I feel like making resolutions and actually sticking to them. My Instagram feed fills up with up close and personal pictures of all things in bloom and I start to feel a little bit like an actual artist. I even thought “these aren’t outtakes! This is art!” when I looked at those first pancake photos. Thinking of myself as an artist has never been easy for me. So when I have those moments that have me believing in myself, I grab onto them.

Camp Wilding, the adult summer camp where I’m teaching a workshop on phone photography, is approaching quickly. I bought a poster sized tablet to write down some talking points and I am thinking of devoting a whole page to outtakes. We are always striving for some preconceived notion of perfection. Sometimes that intense focus on achieving perfection causes us to miss the beauty of imperfection. So I would like to propose that we erase the word ‘perfection’ and shift that focus to the interesting, the beauty of the slightly off center, the deliciousness of that first pancake.