The Frustration Factor: Why Photos Don’t Always Match the Magic You Saw
The vista was breathtaking! Standing on a hill overlooking a valley in mid-spring, with a narrow road winding through it, I knew I had to capture it with my camera. The little red barn tucked into one of the road’s bends was the perfect focal point. I set up my tripod, connected my remote shutter trigger, framed the shot just right, and snapped what was surely an award-winning landscape photograph. It turned out to be a perfect example of photography frustration.
I’m not going to go into what all was wrong with that shot. In truth, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it. The composition was appealing. The colors were mostly true. All the elements I was looking at in real life were there. It just didn’t “wow” me the way the scene did in real life. This wasn’t the first time this happened, and it wasn’t the last. It still happens, several years and several photography courses later. Photography frustrations don’t always stem from a lack of skill or vision. However, by learning what does generate it, you can get closer to producing in your camera and in your prints to what you saw and experienced.
Why the Eye Sees Differently Than the Camera
The Human Side
The human visual system is a biological wonder. That’s partly because when we see, it’s more than just our eyes doing the work. Our eyes constantly—and without our conscious awareness—adjust to shifts in light and shadow. They also blend areas of focus and detail across a wide scene.
As visual stimuli enter the structures of the eye, the brain is already primed to respond. There’s a continuous, behind-the-scenes conversation between the brain and our senses. By the time the brain processes what the eyes have seen, it’s ready to interpret and enhance that information.
As a result, we may “see” a sky that looks bluer than it actually is, or grass that seems greener, or a little red barn that pops out more than it physically does. Our brain isn’t just recording—it’s interpreting, emphasizing, and sometimes even beautifying.
The Camera Side
Camera developers have been trying to replicate the relationship mechanically and technologically. Where our eyes adapt dynamically to different lighting conditions, a camera has a fixed dynamic range. It needs help to capture the variations in those different lighting conditions. Improvements in sensors have enhanced the cameras’ ability to mimic that ability. We can also program a camera to take several exposures at different dynamic ranges, and then use a computer program to blend them all together to bring us closer to what we’d see in real life.
Cameras don’t automatically adjust to isolate a subject from its background the way our eyes and brain do. While cameras can blur the background or keep everything sharp, they need us to tell them how to do it, by changing settings like aperture or focus point.
On the other end of the spectrum, we experience what feels like infinite focus. We know we can’t literally focus on everything at once, especially not out to the horizon—but our brain makes it seem that way. When we look at a landscape or the ocean, our eyes jump quickly from one point to another, and our brain stitches those impressions together. The result is a seamless perception where everything we look at feels sharp and clear.
Color is another thing cameras struggle with, because light is tricky and often changes the colors we think we see. The camera makers are accommodating the struggle by using proprietary color profiles and white balance algorithms in the camera to try and match what we see. Sometimes it works and we get to avoid a photography frustration.
Common Photography Frustrations
Washed-Out Skies and Lost Shadows
Sometimes what we thought was a gorgeous sunset-stained sky or perfect blue comes out gray or dull. We also may lose some details that we saw in a shadowy area. Sometimes we can’t find the texture of stone or wood, or some other interesting detail.
Lack of Depth or Emotion
The landscape scene I described above lacked depth. It all looked flat, not like the layers of the valley that I seeing. Sometimes, we’ll try to take a picture of something that moves us, only to look at it and see that the feeling is just missing.
Flat or Dull Colors
Sometimes I don’t even notice that the colors are dull in real life due to weather, because my brain is telling me that the buffalo is a rich brown instead of a grayish-black. But it’s common to get your photos onto the screen and be underwhelmed by the richness of color that isn’t there.
Motion Blur or Unintended Sharpness
Boy, it’s hard to get pictures of kids being cute while they’re playing, because they’re in constant motion. Trying to compensate for the motion by speeding up the shutter means I have to figure out how to get enough light in there to make the scene show up. Other times I didn’t realize I’d moved just the tiniest bit while the shutter was open, and I can’t even tell what I was trying to shoot. There are still other times when I wanted to get a picture of something against a background that I didn’t want in focus — but it was.
Distraction by Background Elements the Eye Ignored
This happens to me a lot – I get so focused (no pun intended) on my subject that I miss that power line cutting across the sky in arrogant defiance. I got a great shot of a river tumbling over some mountain boulders, and I missed the soda can down in the corner — but my camera didn’t.
Ways to Bridge the Photography Frustration Gap
Photography is a journey for me. I almost always have at least one course in progress to help me improve my skill. One thing I’m learning along the way is that even the photos that I thought were failures may have some redeeming value with a little help from technology. Here are some suggestions to help reconcile what you saw with what you can print or publish.
Learn to See Like a Camera
As you get more familiar with your camera, you can start to anticipate how the sensor will interpret light, and this is going to be the most valuable information in this challenge. You can also use the viewfinder and screen to pre-visualize, although they’re not always a great truth-tellers. Pay attention to the composition. As I wrote in my post on composition, you can do a lot of things to fix a lot of stuff, but a bad composition is a bad composition. However, there’s never just one correct composition. You may find that the play of light on your subject is more interesting if you step five steps to the left, or raise the camera over your head, or lie down on the ground. Yeah, we photographers will contort ourselves into some interesting compositions of ourselves to get the shot we want.
Use the Right Tools
Shoot RAW if your camera is capable of it. While you can’t send a RAW image to a printer, and a RAW image will need a piece of software to turn it into something usable, the RAW image can be manipulated more than a JPG file can because the RAW image contains more of the data that makes up the image.
Learn when and how to use filters. Two of the most commonly used are polarizing filters and neutral-density (ND) filters. Polarizers reduce glare and reflections, allowing you to see through surfaces like water or glass more clearly, and they can also deepen the color of skies and foliage.
Neutral-density filters reduce the amount of light entering the lens without affecting color or detail. They allow you to use longer shutter speeds—like taking a five-second exposure of ocean waves—without overexposing the entire image.
Choose lenses that match your vision. My landscape should have been shot with a wide-angle lens, but I didn’t have one at the time. I thought a zoom lens would let me capture that charming barn in greater detail, but what it did was compress the entire scene, flattening it out. This was what I described in my post on Lens Compression. Understanding how lenses “see” what you’re looking at will help you make better lens choices.
In my first paragraph, I mentioned using a tripod and a remote shutter trigger. These two tools have a lot of uses, from repeating a shot for a time-lapse effect, to low-light long exposures. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on either one, but if you’re getting a tripod, get a sturdy one. You don’t want one of the legs collapsing and crashing your camera to the concrete.
Post-Processing Magic
Look— even Ansel Adams had photography frustrations. He “fixed” his photos and made adjustments to light and shadows. Don’t be ashamed to do the same thing with software. You can recover the details in shadows and balance the highlights. There are color adjustments you can make to match your memory or to compensate for an overcast day —which is what we seem to get a lot of when we’re on vacation. The tools also let you crop thoughtfully (to get rid of that soda can littering the river and my photograph — if I’d seen it in real life, I’d have picked it up and thrown it away) and to correct odd distortions, like buildings that look like they’re leaning.
Embrace the Art of Interpretation
Photography is art. It’s also a translation of what you saw, a communication. To me, aspen trees look like they should all be painted with watercolor. Yes, the aspens in real life look like that to me. So I used a watercolor filter to create a watercolor-like image of a stand of aspens next to a stream. The image was otherwise not going to be usable, because I wasn’t close enough to get a clear photo of the trees (and I couldn’t get close enough because I didn’t want to disturb the buffalo nearby). I used my imagination to overcome that photography frustration.
Use light, framing, and style to convey emotion. If you can’t get a clear shot, could you make a frame out of the obstacles? If the sun won’t cooperate, can you help the viewer feel the gray of the day?
Just have fun taking your shots. Take lots of them! Among the many “just okay” shots you get, you will find a gem that brings it all back to you, and that’s the one you’ll use to tell the story of the event.
When to Capture and When to Experience
This can be a delicate balance to walk. I love new adventures, but I also love capturing the memories in my camera. However, the thing I most appreciate about new adventures is sharing them with the people I love, as they’re happening. My family knows how much I enjoy snapping picture of the places we go and the things we do — and they also know that my time with them is valuable, because I make time to be present with them.
Sometimes, the moment you’re experiencing is just yours. You raise your camera to your eye and place your finger on the shutter, take a deep breath, … and stop. Lowering the camera and taking it all in again, you express a private prayer of thanks for this time, this place, this existence. Some things just can’t be captured in a camera.
Finally, if finding something to take a picture of is a slog, don’t. I don’t always find something interesting on a walk. Now, if I was out doing macro photo, extreme close-ups, I would probably fill my memory card. But sometimes it’s just not there for you. And that’s okay. Don’t work so hard to find something photogenic that you lose the joy of it.
Your Turn
One thing I keep in mind when I’m struggling with something is that there is no possible way that I’m the first person to be facing it. So start there – you’re not alone. We’ve all been there. You’ll have to do some learning, and you’ll have to do some experimenting to get fewer photography frustrations. Fewer — never “none.” And remember this: You can’t always capture what you saw, but you can express what you felt.
Do you have a particular photography frustration you haven’t been able to overcome? Drop a comment below the “Related Posts” section, and we’ll see if we can find a solution together.
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