Why Bad Photos Are Better

The title of this video isn't silly clickbait or some sort of dumb joke. I actually do think that bad photos can be better than good photos. Don't panic. I'm still sane. Let me explain exactly what I mean, and we might just learn something about photography together. For starters, what do I mean by good photos and bad photos? Well, I think what we often think of as a good photo is one that's technically correct. It's sharp. It's in focus. It's correctly exposed and the composition is organized and pleasing, and the framing is pointing our eye directly to the right focal point. The colors are natural and it allows the subject to take over and the photo to vanish. It's not like we're looking at a photo of a car. We're looking at a car. On the other hand, a bad photo is kind of the opposite of that, right? Maybe it has some motion blur or the horizon is wonky or the colors are super out of whack. Maybe it's super overexposed. Or when you were developing it, you breathed in a little too much fixer and ended up turning the grain into a Swiss cheese nightmare. That's called reticulation, by the way. Or maybe there's nothing technically wrong with the photo, but it's just kind of oddly composed or it feels out of balance or it might just be not quite what you were expecting. I think you should worry a lot less about taking good photos. And in fact, I think you should lean into taking bad ones for a few very important reasons. But let's be clear. I'm not saying that you can just take blurry photos of the ground and then put a white border around them and say it's an anarchistic take on the concept of quality in a post art AI driven capitalistic society, because we all know that's not what you really want. And it's not what anybody else wants either. So you still do need to at least try to use that trust fund to do some good. Also should be fairly obvious by now, but this obviously does not apply to commercial photography or weddings or anything of that sort. If you're hired to shoot real estate and you take pictures of the house doing like double exposures on red scale film, you're probably not going to get a call back. We're just talking about art photography here. Fine art or fart for short. So why should you take bad photos then? Well, I'll tell you. But first, I'm going to tell you about this video's sponsor, which is Skillshare. You might have noticed I've been uploading a lot lately. I found that the best way for me to stay sane with a heavy workload is to find new ways to have fun creatively. Lately, I've been making some portraits of this grumpy old man. If you've ever tried photographing dogs, you'll know it's a lot harder than it looks. I've been getting better, though, and that's thanks to the pet portraits class I've been taking. Skillshare has so many different classes like this that can really stretch your skills and creativity. And with the curated learning paths, it's really easy to start small and work your way up. If you want to get better at photography or filmmaking or really any flavor of art, Skillshare has a huge range of classes you can take. I definitely recommend checking out the creative career category. It's got loads of really interesting stuff from some pretty big names. Plus, as a bonus, the first 500 people to use the link in the description will get a free one month trial of Skillshare. Get started today. Thank you, Skillshare. Here's the first reason you should take bad photos. It's creatively freeing. What does that mean? I don't know. Let's ask Picasso. It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. Interesting. So it's like less about technical accuracy and form and more about freely expressing yourself without being tied to the constraints of modern perfectionism. Yeah, pretty much, mate. In practice, this basically just means that instead of focusing on the right way to do things, you're dedicating much more of your brain power to the thoughts and feelings and ideas you want to convey with the photos you're taking. We'll come back to that one. The second reason you should take some absolutely awful steaming hot dog is that it's more you. I'm sorry that sounded really mean. That's not what I meant. Can we try again? What I mean is that when you try to squeeze the U-shaped art peg into the square sized peg hole, if you try to conform to everyone else's standards of what good is, you end up losing the U-ness of the work you're creating. The stuff that you do differently to everybody else is the stuff that gives your work personality, whether that's your choices in exposure or your love for high angles. Those bad choices are what make your photos unique. I love to have messy edges in my frames, and I also love to cut parts of people off when I take portraits. Every photography textbook and several previous clients have told me that that's bad, which is true, unless you're me, because I like it and I hate minimalism. Or any ism for that matter. Isms, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an ism. He should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon. I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me. But cutting people off in portraits and having messy edges isn't just me not paying attention or my glasses getting in the way of the viewfinder. It probably started out that way, but now it's deliberate. And it's because of the third reason that you should take bad photos. When you take a bad photo, the photo doesn't disappear. You're not looking at a man. You're looking at a photo of a man. For me, that's a good thing, because I really want the medium of photography to be a part of the experience. Like if you have some free time this weekend, go to the art gallery. And when you're finished being strip searched for tins of soup, go and look at some old oil paintings. When you look at old oil paintings, you can see these like thick layers of heavy paint that's built up over time, and it's got this texture to it. And the fact that it's a painting makes looking at the picture so much more enjoyable. I want that same philosophy applied to my photos. And so leaving artifacts of the photographic process visible to the viewer makes that happen. And maybe the most important reason to take bad photos. It's fun when you take the guardrails off and you allow yourself the freedom to experiment and fail. You learn so much about yourself and the photos you want to be making. You stop thinking in terms of what you can see that fits the predetermined rules of composition in your head. And instead, you start looking for feelings and stories. And sure, sometimes we do want to take good photos, and sometimes that doesn't always go to plan. But I think just because you didn't get the result you wanted doesn't mean you should write a photo off. Here's a photo that I shot in Soho a few years ago. Forgot to meter completely, just blasted away. I think it was pushed like three stops. It's super contrasty. I was aiming to get like a softer, more cinematic image of the people inside the restaurant. But what I ended up with was this very graphic geometric image. And initially, when I saw the negative, I was super bummed about it. But you know what? I like this photo. It's got mystery and mystique, and it's so visually striking that I think I prefer this to the shot I was actually going for. And because I missed the shot up, I learned that actually sometimes I would quite like to go for that high contrast Bauhaus-y kind of look. I would never have learned that if I was only taking good photos. The real key message to all of this is don't paint yourself into a corner and only ever try to take Instagram bangers. Try letting go of the reins a little bit. Let yourself make a few more mistakes and try shooting by feel, fast and dirty, and just see what you can learn along the way. If you're feeling inspired and would like just a little more encouragement to be freer in the way you shoot, I made you a video about taking photos without even looking, which you might like, and you can watch it here or here. Stay hydrated and create art. Also, thank you so much for 20,000 subscribers, you watching and sharing and commenting and telling me when I've been silly. You're awesome. Stay hydrated.