Golf and Photography
Not golf photography, but how I try to apply the only lesson I’ve ever learned in golf to photography.
Years ago, my wife and I took golf lessons. She was born a good golfer, and consequently got a lot out of the lessons. I’m a lousy golfer, and managed to learn one single tip in the whole six-week course. The instructor saw how every one of my drives would slice pretty sharply to the right. His advice? “Hook it.” That is, he wanted me to intentionally try to get the ball to hook left. I already knew what it felt like to go too far right. By learning what it felt like to go too far left, could eventually learn how to hit it right down the middle.
So I try to bring that to my photography. Whatever I’m doing wrong, I try to overcompensate the other direction. That lets me find out what I need to do to get it right and drive it right down the middle.
A good example is in my lighting. During a recent shoot, I knew I wanted a dramatic rim lighting on the subject. I set up the lights to do what I wanted, snapped off a few test shots, and was just not pleased with the result. It was close, but just not there. I tweaked the lights back and forth, in and out, started playing with a number of variables. It started to get frustrating, and I hate doing too much experimentation with a model on set.
So rather than tweak it incrementally, I went whole hog and moved the lights completely incorrectly. Rather than giving me harsh rim light, the setup created an overall flat light. There was no modeling, no dimensionality to it. It was awful. But it also showed me what I was missing before; the lights as I’d set them up before were too harsh. I wanted rim lighting, but it wasn’t until I washed everything out with boring flat lighting did I realize that I wasn’t really looking for overly dramatic rim lighting, but a nice accent rim light. Sometimes you have to go all the way to the right to see how far left you’d been going before.
These days I’m applying the same lesson to my Photoshop post-process work. For a long time, I held back on doing any post-processing at all. Now that I’m putting a little more thought into the final piece, I want to know that I’m hitting my target. So I’ll do some experimentation and take the intended filtering (sharpening, for instance, desaturation, or others) way too far. It lets me see where my own aesthetic limits are.