In some photography settings there are opportunities to make corrections, but in much of my photographic endeavors there are no second chances.

During this project I made some choices that gave me a lot of grief in the end. Oh, how I wish I could have the chance to do it again and eliminate those mistakes!

I chose to use an older camera that did not have a light meter reading to view the exposure scale. Although I was compensating for this by using the exposure lock, it was only after developing all the rolls that I saw that my original exposure settings which I had "locked," were actually changing between each frame of my sequence. 

The result: instead of the sequence having the same exposure, each frame got exposed differently and produced under and over-exposed images (too dark or too bright.)

I also shot this collection on film, in part because my digital camera body is not full frame and I really wanted my 50mm lens to be a 50mm lens. I also wanted to have consistency in the appearance of the images and so I was eliminating the option of changing the ISO or White Balance that digital cameras so conveniently provide. 

That reasoning backfired because I could not control the light or always find more suitable lighting in such a limited amount of time. Shooting digital could have allowed me to compensate for these varying settings. I hadn't picked a higher film speed that would be more sensitive in so many of the poorly lit areas I found myself shooting in and so I was often having to shoot at less than 1/60th of a second all the way down to 1/4 sec. A perfect equation for either dark or blurry images. Sigh.

Shooting with film however created an atmosphere of anticipation, because neither I nor the participants had the opportunity to have instant feedback. I found this exciting and mysterious, unlike the instant gratification of digital photographs.

One drawback of not having "instant" feedback though was not seeing mistakes immediately and potentially having the chance to correct them. In this project I did not notice until after the fact that my equipment was not doing what I thought it was doing.

But I cannot point all the blame on the limitations of my equipment or film speed. My errors in judgement were largely impart to being nervous and the lack of experience that accompanies trying something new! I could have minimized most of my technical errors and improved my compositions had I not let my own nervous feelings be prompting me to rush and thus distract me from being attentive to my camera settings and the environment around me.

It is disappointing to see how my mistakes affected the outcome of all these images; moments in time which I will never have a second chance to photograph or correct again. I see so many ways that these images could have been better. Yet it's because of my mistakes that I will learn how to improve and how to sharpen my abilities as a photographer.

Even though there were so many shortcomings and technical errors in this project, they are outweighed by the satisfying accomplishment that I was able to connect with perfect strangers, who then allowed me to capture and share in a moment of their lives. In the end, this is what I've enjoyed and what allows me to feel as though I succeeded as a photographer.