Basilica of the Sacred Heart
If you are unhappy with a photograph and you have the opportunity to get a “do over,” will you go ahead and do it? (Please answer, “yes.”)
Faced with that most recent opportunity, I chose to not only revisit the site, but sketched up images as a reference and included on notes where I stood when I made the original photograph. I thought that was pretty obsessive, until I came up with the idea to make up small prints, so I had a record of what I did the last time I was there. Thankfully, I came up with the small print idea after it was too late to actually make it happen.
The project was important enough to me to make sure that I “got it right the first time” because sometimes photoshop isn’t enough. I remember back (a really long time ago) to a workshop with David Bayles discussing the proper exposure of film. He said that if you didn’t get the correct exposure at first, neither minus or plus development would help salvage the print because both of those procedures compromised the information on the negative. There was really no substitute for getting it right the first time. When faced with the opportunity to do it better than the first time, use that "do over."
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