Perfection is the Enemy of Good

Looking for perfection is to insist on the total realization of a goal and to reject any compromise.
This decreases the chance of achieving even a part of that goal.

Many photographers are hung-up on the pursuit of technical perfection. They obsess over MTF charts and other measurable aspects of image quality. But, the pursuit of perfection is to worship a false god. Perfection is unattainable.

Street Kiss. Havana, Cuba. March, 2015

Rather than trying for perfection, the goal, and one that is attainable, is personal excellence. Excellence is not quantitative, it’s qualitative. Excellence in photography is about having a vision – a desire to best oneself. This is accomplished by setting goals, preferably ones that are a bit beyond what one thinks is possible. Just as an athlete wants to run the 100 meter dash a fraction of a second faster than they every have before, so too does establishing a difficult, but attainable target for ones work.

Buying the sharpest lens or a camera with the highest resolution sensor available is just a matter of spending money. And having a high enough level of disposable income so that this is possible is no measure of ones accomplishment, at least not as a photographer.

When it comes to image making, perfection is a meaningless goal. For example – the image Street Kiss above.  Though taken with a state-of-the-art camera and an extremely high quality lens designed by one of the world’s finest optical firms, it is, from one perspective – flawed. The main subject, the two women, is out of focus.

Does this matter? Some might think so, but I don’t. In fact one could argue that it is only “convention” that asks for the foreground subject to be in focus, while the background is allowed to become soft. This isn’t the way we see though. Our eyes can only focus on one thing at a time, but our eyes are constantly flitting their narrow field of focus back and forth, and our brains merge these into a cohesive whole where everything is apparently sharp. If you want everything in a scene to be sharp, use an iPhone camera.

In Street Kiss the women are in the foreground, and convention says that they should be sharp. But a case can be made that the barred windows, and auto and the driver, are as much the main subject as are the women. Because the women are in the foreground and engaged in a very human moment they are a main subject, but not the only one. Having them out of focus is but one way of interpreting the scene and the moment.

The point is that this image is not “perfect”. No image can be, because perfection is unattainable. But whether one likes the photograph or not, whether one thinks it “succeeds” or not, is not the issue. What is going on here is my attempt to interpret a moment in time, to tell a story, and the imaging “language” that I’ve used is somewhat at odds with convention.

But I am pleased with the image. I feel as if I pushed myself by creating it and presenting it along with its “imperfection”. So the next time that you are frustrated by the lack of “perfection” in your work, ask yourself if it meets your own private criteria for “excellence“. Have you pushed the limits of your own creativity? If the answer is “yes”, then you have succeeded, and nothing else matters.

Michael – March, 2015

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