The 7P’s and the giant photo FAIL
The fellas at the This Week in Photography blog posted an excellent entry about the 7 P’s, which I feel so strongly about, I’m going to bold-type: Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
When you go out to get a photograph, there are two ways you can set out. Prepared and unprepared. When I was in Basic Combat Training (Basic for short) I heard all about the “7Ps.” At the time, I thought it was just my instructors being, well – you know….difficult.
Full entry at TWIPPhoto.com.
This was illustrated in a most exquisite photography FAIL of mine at my fiancee’s MBA graduation.
Accomplished Checklist:
- Camera battery fully charged
- Flash batteries fully charged
- Perfect framing, focus and light settings from where I was sitting.
Things that should have been added:
- Knowing she would be graduating from the management college instead of the business college like I’d assumed. 10 seconds of research in the graduation pamphlet would have told me this.
- Paying attention when the correct college for her graduation was called to the stage so that I would have noticed she was the second person in line, and not in alphabetical order.
- Leaving the flash and camera ON so I could wake it from sleep mode and get the shot, instead of fumbling through “OMG WHY WONT ANYTHING WORK?!”
- Zooming out first (70-300mm lens) so I could find her quickly on stage and zoom in to quickly frame, instead of trying to find her with a super-zoomed-in 1-person-at-a-time frame.
So yeah, lack of proper prior preparation resulted in piss poor performance. I missed the shot which would have looked great framed next to her diploma. For me, heartbreaking; for her (luckily) a funny story of what a camera geek I am.
And to think, before all of this I was kicking myself for not bringing my Canon 70-200 f2.8L because I thought I’d need the extra reach of the crap Quantaray 70-300. Everyone’s said it a million times, the best gear in the world doesn’t matter when you miss the shot.
Lesson = learned!