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| My perfectionism would previously have never allowed me to accept hot spots on her legs and arms. |
There was a time when I took it as a compliment. Of course, it depends on the context. Usually it was about my work, whether it be photography, music, or just the expectations I set in the office with my team. That uncompromising, at-all-costs, all-or-nothing way of doing things that drove me to excellence (or madness) was something that I prided myself upon. The fact that someone recognized (what I thought was) my attention to detail generally made me beam with pride.
But as I get older, I began questioning this mentality and whether it has done me more harm than good. Whether it held me back from personal growth, whether it ruined some relationships, whether it was a cop-out (excuse) for not focusing on the bigger picture, or whether it was simply an expression of being obsessive-compulsive. Because all of these statements are true and the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel that being a perfectionist wasn't as noble as I'd made it out to be.
First off, perfection is an obsession.
When I first started retouching pictures, I had a pretty weak handle on Photoshop. I basically only knew how to fix skin blemishes. By learning how to use the dodge/burn tools and the heal tool, I became pretty good at finding and fixing skin blemishes. What's that saying? "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Yup, that pretty much hits the proverbial nail on the head (pun intended). What I didn't realize was that I was obsessed with making faces "perfect," and as I overcorrected for these blemishes, I erased all that the humanity from the faces of my subjects. Quite literally, my models began looking inhuman. As an example, I was so obsessed with lightening the darkness under the eyes that my models' eyes started looking two-dimensional. There was no longer any depth to my models' eyeballs; a spherical and protruding object on the face. Without the shadows that define the eyeball as a spherical object, my subjects began looking like they had very flat and inhuman faces. But I couldn't see it. I was too obsessed with getting rid of these "imperfections" on the face.
Which leads me to my second point. Perfection is a delusion from seeing the bigger picture.
When people told me that my models looked overly airbrushed or fake, I couldn't hear it. I felt that I had done a great job "perfecting" their faces. I was using perfection as an excuse to not focus on learning the other tools within Photoshop. More importantly, however, I think I was using perfection as an excuse to delay venturing outside my comfort zone. It would have been better for me to continue my retouching education and to learn how to retouch on a higher level or how to create a more compelling picture. Instead, I was stunting my own growth by overly focusing on the facial blemishes that were "ruining" my pictures. Ironically, 99% of the population of viewers did not see any of these blemishes to begin with. I was basically the only one that could see these blemishes, and I was basically doing this work for myself. I was so delusional about how I was making my images technically perfect that I couldn't see that I was not improving the overall value of these images to the outside world. In fact, if anything, I was detracting value from the outside world by trying to perfect these pictures.
But it wasn't just me. I had plenty of photography students mired in the same delusion. They would make perfect crops. Use perfect lighting. Pixel peep to ensure they had achieved perfect focus on the models' faces. Only to make a sterile image that lacked any life, any humanity, and (unfortunately for them) any value as an image to be consumed by the public. They had achieved technical perfection at the expense of removing all intrinsic life and value from the image. I mean, we literally threw away every image that wasn't tack-sharp on the pixel level. For what? So the critics on dpreview.com wouldn't be able to flame us? In retrospect, it was delusional to think that an image's value was solely based upon its pixel perfection. Or the focus. Or any single dimension.
I understand better now why that was happening to me. At the time, I was a first-year photographer, and I didn't have the context to understand the entirety of what makes for a good image. I didn't understand all the value that a single image contained, and I sure as hell didn't know how to retouch to those ends. So it was easy for me to get mired in the details of removing skin blemishes. It's a lot like trying to explain to a 6-year-old why her tiff with her best friend isn't the end of the world. Because for her, it is the end of her world. For her short 6-year-old life, her best friend is everything to her, and that feeling of her world collapsing in on her is very real. Trying to reason with her that it doesn't matter requires an understanding of life that she doesn't have due to her age and inexperience with life. It's like trying to explain the fourth dimension to me. I just don't get it. I can't see it, and I can't touch or feel it, so to me it doesn't make sense. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure physicists have already solved for many dimensions beyond the 3rd dimension in their exploration of the universe.
But in retrospect, I could have put down the retouching pen (I work on a Wacom tablet) and asked myself to explore the other aspects of retouching so I could learn to see the bigger picture. But I couldn't. I couldn't stop chasing this obsession of perfecting skin blemishes to see the bigger picture. I was happy living in this delusion. But because of this delusion, I was compelled to repeat my mistakes. To continue to make perfectly flat human faces. And I realize now that perfection is like that one friend who says, "Oh, what's the harm in doing this one more time? It's no big deal. It'll be great". But that person is not a friend. He or she is an enabler of my problems. That "friend" is keeping me from growing just so he or she has someone to continue doing bad things with. That's not a friend; that's a bad guy!
So instead of putting down the retouching pen, I say, "You're right, it does look better like this
All jokes aside, perfection has held me back as much as it has driven me to excellence/madness. I have gone to insane lengths in the name of perfection, but I think it's time to retire that mentality. My favorite pictures now are the ones that are "accidents". Pictures that are impossible to recreate because they are literally lightning in a bottle, frames between poses, forgetting to wind the film and double-exposing on the same frame, moving while shooting (or shooting through objects) and therefore creating motion blur or obstructive bokeh. It's the same as my shift in mentality toward shooting. I used to shoot to make pictures. Now I shoot to make friends. I mean it's even more poignant now that there's AI text-to-image generators and I can literally make pictures without people, so it's even more paramount that I stay in the moment to be part of the human experience rather than strictly focus on making compelling images. Sometimes it means slowing down. Sometimes it means stepping outside of my obsessive-compulsive mindset. Sometimes it means actually listening to what the model is saying (God forbid, lol). Whatever it is, it means that I'm not focusing on perfection but rather on the experience of taking pictures with another human being. These days, that is worth more than the value of the perfect image to me.
But your mileage may vary. I'm a lot older than I was when I first started taking pictures. The philosophies that drove me to shoot back then are no longer the core drivers. I have aged and evolved over time. I would never tell you that I'm right and you're wrong. Instead, I would suggest that we are each on our own individual journeys. We might overlap. We might not. Regardless, I just might have some stories that might be interesting enough to share and to consider. That's all.
