I don't know what the actual metric is to be considered a viral video but relative to my small instagram following, this reel I posted not so recently went viral. The instagram algorithm gods shined their light on me that fateful evening in Las Vegas. This all happened while I was out there shooting for my neon project. It was just a quick 8-second reel. Didn’t even show the final image. Well that's because I couldn't. I made the reel about ten minutes after I took the shot and this is not digital so I wouldn't see the final image for at least a week, or in this case actuality a month… ya know, sometimes life gets in the way.
The Reel
Within minutes it had several thousand views. I chalked up these initial 2800 views to just good timing. Sometimes that happens with Instagram. Hitting the timing is part of the game. I checked it again about 45 minutes later while eating some amazing pizza from Pizza Rock. Seriously good pizza, by the way. If you’re ever in Vegas and want good pie… the reel was at 30,000 views! WTF? By the end of the following day it was well into the 100K range and climbing fast. It topped out around 230k views a few days later. I couldn’t believe it! I was famous! Not really, but I did get a bunch more followers for whatever that's worth…
This isn't some brag about how amazing I am because I had one not-so-viral, viral reel. Just to be clear, I don't have that much of an ego. I am certainly not amazing… yet ;) My point after this long winded story is that the image I took, the image at the center of the reel, was an utter failure. It didn’t work. It was poorly exposed. I obviously messed up my calculations, and to top it off something went wrong when I developed it. The negative was thin and useless. It was crap. I blew it. The irony was that this was my most popular post by a massive margin.
Our failures are something we don’t often hear about or talk about. Social media makes it seem that we are all KILLIN IT!. We are all busy! Selling left and right. So much work that we have to turn clients away. Life is amazing and there are never any mistakes. It’s no secret that social media is a lie but we gloss over these failures even when we chat with our peers, friends and clients. Why can’t we just admit this shit is hard? It really does take 10,000 hours to get good. I think I’m up to at least 15,000 and I still feel like I’m not there. I have been shooting with film on and off for 25 years and I still fuck up… all the time.
So in light of this admission, I want to share some of my screw ups and the Vegas image I took on that evening the instagram gods looked my way.
The crap image that just didn’t work out. It took some doing to make it look even this good. The negative was so thin in the shadows that there was almost nothing there and the sign was so blown out that there is literally no retrievable detail. I stomped on the shadows to get even the littlest detail. Doing that really highlights the dust.
This silver print below is another wonderful example of failure. I spent at least four hours in the darkroom working on a set of five to sell. I cropped and fussed, dodged and burned, even did a reel about making it, In the hopes that I could use it for marketing to help sell the image. The thing is once the prints dried they looked flat and lifeless. And the image just wasn’t that good. In the bin they go.
Failed silver print of the salt flats at Rye. I don’t keep the botched prints around. I tear them up and turn them into scrap paper to write notes on.
Above is a failed glass plate from my hiking series. I can’t even begin to know what happened. Maybe Exposure, Maybe development? Both? Either way I wasn’t paying attention that day.
I recently did some portraits of Bill Miller (@billtmiller). For the most part they all worked. Except for two shots. I opted to switch lenses and try a wide angle that I hadn’t used before. It had multiple settings for the flash sync. Of course it was on the wrong setting which caused the flash to not sync with the lens. The image below is the result. The light you can see is the incandescent I was using to help focus. Not only was it two lost exposures, but the expense in film is also on my mind. That’s about $16 in film.
So here’s to admitting and owning your mistakes. They can’t all be winners! Actually the reality is most of them are losers.
To quote David Yarrow ( if you don’t know who he is look him up) : “If you get ten amazing shots a year, like ten really amazing killer images, that’s a good year.”
You just have to get out there and keep shooting. Eventually you’ll get to the point when you can get ten really killer shots in a year. I certainly know that I’m not there yet.