A Landscape Photography Failure - How To Turn Failure Into Success.

This weekend I had great plans to go on a landscape photography adventure. These plans turned into a major photography failure! Today I would like to share this experience with you so we can all learn from my negative experience together. How can we turn our failures into a success?

1. PLANNING

Let me be completely honest here. My weekend landscape adventure was a failure from day one due to a lack of planning. The extent of my planning for this trip consisted of my desire to capture a beach or cityscape image. This resulted in a quick google search for nearby beaches. A particular beach park popped up in my search that was ranked as one of Florida's most beautiful beaches, and off we went!

The problem with this planning, or lack there of, was that I didn't take into consideration that it's Spring Break, and I live in Florida! Maybe my desire to take images at a beach in Florida during Spring Break wasn't the best of ideas.

2. RESEARCH

Another dilemma was the lack of research about the particular beach I had in mind to photograph. Generally, before I go anywhere, I look up the location on google for its curb appeal so to speak. This way I know what type of images I may be able to capture at the particular location. Although this location did have some points of interest, they didn't work so well in a photographic standpoint in my opinion.

On this trip I also brought my dog a long for the ride. Although this beach park did allow dogs, they weren't allowed on the beach itself for whatever reason. If I did my proper research, I might have found this information before we arrived (and paid 8 dollars) and entered the beach park. With that being said, maybe I would have stuck around a little bit longer and explored the park a little bit more if I didn't bring my dog with me. Maybe I would have just skipped this location all together and would have found a better place to photograph. Either way, I simply didn't do enough research about the location.

3. TIMING

After I realized the beach park location wasn't going to work out for me, I decided to leave and look for another location. In the same general area as the beach park was a dog beach, so I decided to go check it out.

The dog beach was actually really nice and had a couple areas I thought would look great in a landscape image. The problem with this, once again, was that the beach was overly crowded. There was no way I was going to get an image I could keep due to the large crowds at the beach. My biggest disappointment was that we ended up getting perfect light at the beach. It was so upsetting to be at a great location with absolutely gorgeous lighting conditions and not being able to get that great image! If I had only used my time more wisely and arrived at this location at sunrise instead of sunset I could have had the beach all to myself. Timing and planning is crucial to a successful photography trip. Likely, in the early morning hours, the beach would have been empty, or at least much less crowded than it was at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I realized that great timing can either make or break an image.

4. FAILURE IS OKAY!

Although I have no images to show from this photography trip, I did gain a lot of knowledge. It's very important to realize that failure is OK! It just so happens that I watched two of my favorite photographers speak about failure recently! Nick Page is an amazing landscape photographer who spoke a little bit about failure in one of his previous YouTube videos (Watch it here). He explains how difficult landscape photography can be and how these things we spoke about today make an impact in our images. Thomas Heaton is another amazing landscape photographer who also touched on this topic (Watch it here). To be honest, it seems he touches on this topic in many of his videos! This just proves that failure is truly okay, as long as we learn from our mistakes. Failure is what makes us great. People learn because people fail, a lot!

I hope this blog post was able to help, or at least encourage photographers not to be afraid of their failures. We all fail, it's a way of life. We just have to understand why we failed. This is they key to success; to understand why we failed so we can fix our mistakes.

Thank you for taking the time to enjoy my blog post! If you would like to see more of my work, you can see my portfolio here, and visit my store gallery here. If you would like to contact me, my information can be found here. I hope you enjoyed my blog and I hope to see you again on the next one!