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Let’s talk about failure

Failure is a word that most people dread. It is a word that carries a negative connotation, and people tend to associate it with disappointment, frustration, and desperation. But what is failure?

I think it is safe to say that we all know what it “means” but what we miss to understand is that failures vary from person to person. For example, if I’m a chef and my food today tastes terrible, that would be considered a massive fail, right? Now let’s say I’m terrible at cooking and today, even though it tastes pretty bad, I didn’t burn it! Wouldn’t that be a win?

You see, failure it’s sort of a mindset and how we choose to take things and events that happen to us. We all fail at some point. It doesn’t matter who you are, and what you do, there will be a point in your life when you consider that you failed at something.


Photographing Canterbury Surf Champs 2023

Now, let’s get to the point and some photography information shall we? This year, I was taking pictures at the Women's Canterbury Surf Champs in Christchurch, New Zealand. This is a fantastic annual competition organized by a group of fantastic women. I’ve done this for the past 3 years so it wasn’t anything new to me. I knew how it worked, I knew the system and I knew what I was doing.

Now, if you are a surf photographer you know that it is all about capturing the beauty and power of waves, the surfers who ride them, and the landscapes that surround them. Is not an exact science and it depends on a lot external aspects that you cannot control no matter how hard you try (and believe me, I’ve tried). To give you a little bit of context the day was awful! It was gray, cold and miserable. The tides were so so so incredibly low but waves seemed to be alright so, off I go I set up my gear (if you want to know about what gear and how I setup for surf photography, check out my post Surf photography), and get ready for a long day.


The previous years I’ve been shooting with my lovely Nikon D7500 and my Sigma 150-500mm lens and I’ve gotten incredible results! This year, I upgraded to a Nikon Z7ii and I was so excited! I though “this year I’m going to knock it out of the park because I have a better camera and I have a lot more experience”. Boy, was I wrong! Let’s go through what went wrong that day.


Mistake #1

Let’s remember that the D7500 has a cropped sensor and that the z7ii is a full sensor camera. So off course a lens (unless you use a cropped sensor lens which I wasn’t) do not have the same focal lens when used in cameras with different sensor size. This is a concept I was very familiar so it wasn’t like I didn’t know about it but it still hit me in the face which made a great start to my day. I used my sigma lens, instead of acting like a 150-500mm lens, it acted roughly as a 225-750mm lens. So all those lovely closeups and surfers filling up the frame where loooong gone. So a went from the picture in the left from (2021) to the picture in the right (2023). Also let’s not forget that the tide was incredibly low so it wasn’t only my lack of memory’s fault but nature’s as well.




Mistake #2

Second mistake, In preparation for this competition I pre saved my settings (Check out my post to know about this) under “U2” so it will all be ready for me. As I said before it was gray and miserable so my ISO had to be around 1600 to be able to freeze the moment with those amazing water splashes that I love very much. Now, what I didn’t know was that if you save a certain ISO under your settings, and your camera goes into sleep mode, when you start it back up your ISO reverts back to your original settings (aka ISO 64). This is something I should have realized sooner because that’s what the metering and histogram is for! But clearly that wasn’t a good day for me because I missed it several times and only realized when I checked and saw they were absolutely black! I know it is a basic concept and even though I’ve been doing this for years, it just slipped my mind and I’m not very proud of it.


Mistake #3

I could keep going with the endless list of mistakes that day but I will jump to the last one which was my mindset. I was so disappointed in everything that day that I got into my head. I started thinking “I should know better than this” every time I caught myself doing something wrong (which at that point was every second move). I was so caught up in what I was doing wrong that I just missed even more things. More opportunities, more waves… more everything. I just wasn’t thinking straight.


The cherry on top

And to make my day even better… The day decided to get better, the sun was coming out, tide was on its way so surfers were getting closer and I started to come around and doing a better job . I thought to myself “ok, I might be able to get some really good ones”. All of a sudden I was standing behind my camera (close enough but not yet touching it), no one around me and I looked to my left to talk to my mom who was visiting me from Ecuador and when I looked back, my camera was on he floor. Yup, you read it right. ON. THE. FLOOR. You can imagine me trying to wrap my head around it and noticing my camera was broken (as in I could see parts of the inside of the camera). I still don’t know what went wrong or what I could have done to prevent it. It was just the perfect ending to a disastrous day.

Of course after all of this my mind starting asking questions like:

  • Why didn’t I check the ISO in every single picture?

  • Why did I not check that my settings were correct?

  • Why did I ignore the histogram?

  • I should have hung my camera bag from my trip to prevent it from falling.

  • I shouldn’t be here if you are clearly not good enough to be shooting here.

  • My pictures were terrible.

  • How can you call yourself a photographer after this?!

And so on… Let’s just summarize my internal conversation was a pity party to say the least. Not really good for my mental health and confidence either.


Learnings

So what’s the point of this endless story? Well, we all have bad and terrible days. Again, it doesn’t matter who you are and what you do, I can guarantee these days will always come. Sh*t happens all the time. You might say that all of these mistakes are very rooky mistakes and the truth is, they absolutely are. I know better than that. I’ve been photographing people surfing in and out of competitions for almost 5 years now and I just don’t know what happened to me that day. That’s just life I guess. We all have good and bad days.


It is said that success is built on a foundation of failures, and this could not be truer. Every failure is a learning experience that brings us closer to our goals and makes us resilient. So get out, make mistakes, learn from them and keep growing. I can guarantee I will never ignore the histogram ever again… I can guarantee I will get to know my camera better before I shoot anything… I can definitely mention a million lessons I learnt that day.


Also the pictures weren’t the best but also they weren’t as bad as I thought they were (you can't have a look at some of them at the end of this post - please be gentle as I'm still recovering from this event). There were just not as good as I expected them to be and I just got into my own fears and insecurities which made me miss a lot more things going around me. But you know what, I’m proud of them because I learn some much more from this experience than any other competition I’ve ever been to. And I got back up from this and I’m still standing.

So those are my 2 cents about failure. I have to say exposing myself like this scares me deeply but to be honest, I would have loved to find more stories like this where I can see that I’m not the only one and that these things happen. So here it is, hopefully it can help someone.


Lots of love


Belen






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