This is a shot I took on a cloudy day out on Hampstead Heath in London, looking south.
I’ve fiddled with it in processing a zillion times. I bring up the brightness: too much. I lower the contrast: too dull. I bring up the shadows: I lose too much range from dark to light.
And I crop it. Then I uncrop it. Then I crop again. There’s a perfect frame in there somewhere but I can’t find it.
What I want is that man in the suit, alone and small against the vastness of the field, the trees, and the city yonder. I’ve done versions with the dogwalking woman taken out, but somehow I don’t like that either. I’ll probably excise her again someday. I wish that day I’d had my wide-angle lens on and that I’d understood that the point of the shot was the man alone against the world. So often I don’t really see what I saw until I’m looking at it in Lightroom.
The worst feeling is when I really like what I’m seeing but I realize I didn’t get the shot with that in mind, and that there’s only so much I can do to get it there. It’s often at that point that I think I need to go back and take some more classes in drawing and painting, to make what my camera imperfectly witnessed into something more to my liking.