I set out for one of my weekly walks and, having seen them the previous week, I decided I would try and get one or two good pictures of the Common Terns that have arrived on the lake.
I failed.
I saw plenty of terns and I took lots of photos, but none had the sharpness I wanted.
The composition of some of them is pretty good. Some have captured the elegant and dramatic body and wing shapes of a tern in flight, but they all lack the clarity I would want.
So I ‘failed’.
Only, thinking about it now, it doesn’t feel like failure. It doesn’t feel depressing or frustrating as failure so often can.
I’ve been wondering why?
Could it be that I knew it was always going to be a tough challenge; terns fly fast and rarely glide. My post walk research suggests they fly at about 30km/h although this can increase to 50km/h or a bit more when they are migrating.
What’s more, the ones I saw were either flying around or nesting on an island which was a long way from the nearest shore and me and my camera. Was I simply forgiving myself, making allowances or excuses?
I think why I don’t see it as failure is that in the context of a walk, which is really about feeling calm, content and connected to nature and where I also saw and photographed incredibly cute cygnets, ducklings and goslings, where I watched a mother Grebe feeding her grebette, which is I believe the correct term for a baby grebe, it was something to aspire to but not overly worry about.
A great picture of a tern would have been an ‘extra’ benefit of the walk, it was never the sole reason for the walk.
And I think part of my response can be summed up in a paraphrase of a Thomas Edison quote, “I hadn’t failed, I had just learnt 1000 ways how not to take the photo”.
Footnote: One good tern
In the following couple of weeks I have taken lots more photos of terns and one or two are getting there – crisper and clearer, perhaps practice makes nearly perfect (and yes it was raining)
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