Back in the days when I used a film camera I sent my used films to a lab to be developed. For a while I couldn't understand why some of my photos didn't come out. In my ignorance I believed that those negatives were blank.
But after a while I realised that wasn't the case. When I inspected the negatives there was definitely something there. But what? The person operating the printer was making value judgments on my behalf and only printing what he or she regarded as successful photos.
As it sometimes took me several weeks to fill a film, by the time it went to the lab I often didn't remember what was on it. I was desperate to know what had gone wrong so I started instructing the lab to print all the negatives, even the "bad" ones. That was when I discovered how often my creative experiments were rejected by someone who had no idea what I was trying to achieve. How could I learn from my mistakes if I didn't know what they were?
Thankfully with digital cameras that's no longer an issue.
I hate to think what the lab staff would have thought of this blurry photo. It was one of my most successful photos of 2021 - my first photo ever to win a virtual ribbon at DPChallenge.
The challenge was "Late". My title was "Rush". Without the blur it would have told a very different story.
It's easy to take blurry photos. Sometimes it's hard to get them right.
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