I shared on an earlier blog post that I earned my food accreditation with the Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC). This entailed getting 10 images passed by a panel of qualified national judges. It took 3 tries. I'm writing this post as a qualified judge that is frequently on a panel of 5 judges for Provincial or National image competitions each year for the PPOC. It still took me 3 tries to achieve it. Why? 1) I was learning a new genre of photography, still applying sound technique, 2) Food photography isn't just sound photographic technique, it comes with the ability to cook awesome food and learn the whole new skill of food styling (big learning curve), and 3) judging is not an exact science. Sometimes it feels like throwing spaghetti at a wall hoping that something will stick, and that is perfectly fine. I still value the learning opportunity that is getting my work judged.
As an RN, I'm passionate about health and wellness. My particular expertise falls into addictions and mental health. Mental and physical health are absolutely correlated.
This post is both photography and wellness. The images on this post are the images that either I was confident in them and they didn't get passed for my accreditation, or I wasn't super confident in them, and they are still good but didn't enter them. A lot of my favourite images are among the ones that were rejected. Just because they were rejected, doesn't mean they aren't good.
Bouncing back after distress or frustration is resilience. Any process of meaningful growth usually comes with uncomfortable stretching of some sort. The image of the meat and the bright green sauce didn't get passed because the plates looked dirty to the judges. The plates are textured bamboo plates, not dirty. I still am so proud of the image! The light was so precise as to keep the black plates subdued in the background and the visual elements of the sauce are the highlight of the image. I intentionally used multiple aspects of color-theory, directional light, angles, repetition, asymmetry, framing, shapes, line, pattern, sound composition, texture (even though the textured plates was the reported reason for the unsuccessful score), and built height and dimensionality of the subjects on the plate. As with all food styling, at the end of the day, the dish needs to look delicious in an image. There were a lot of elements of styling that I knew were on-point that still make it a strong image. Even though the supposedly dirty plates was the feedback for why it didn't pass, that doesn't mean it is a bad image. It is still an opportunity to learn and I'm grateful for it! (Remember, I'm saying this as a judge, and I'm not dogging the judging process or the panel that judged it.) I was actually hoping for another round before the accreditation was earned because I was learning so much each time I prepared a submission. It's ok to receive feedback in life, process through it for validity and not internalize it negatively. Inversely, sometimes feedback is what we need to hear from trusted sources, and we can receive it as a gift and make changes that are appropriate. That was the feedback for the meat image, it was what it was, so I moved right along to practicing with more images to submit.
There were other images that were glaringly clear why they didn't pass once I got feedback from the judges. More learning! This is the nurturing process that elevated my skill in this area and I could definitely see the differences in what I was producing at the beginning to when I finally earned my accreditation. I'm grateful!
A side-note. I'm a life-long vegetarian/mostly vegan, so most of my images don't have meat in them. If they do, someone else has cooked it and eaten it.
I earnestly practiced food photography for about 9 months. My people often saw me feverishly cooking new recipes, then taking photographs of them. That was its own learning curve, which I really enjoyed. I even learned how to make vegan macarons! (Some of my recipes are shared on my instagram account: @earthlingspantry.)
I was unsuccessful with this accreditation twice. Failure is another concept that sometimes slams us hard for many different reasons. It hits at our ego, or defenses, our sense of self, and our self-worth. It can feel humiliating, disappointing, and demeaning. The way we speak to ourselves after a perceived failure might be rather harsh. It's like a wave that is hard to fight off. It's ok to name the feelings, give yourself a minute to sit in it without judging and go easy on yourself. We ascribe meaning to our experiences either in constructive or destructive ways. In this case, I knew that a failed submission did not mean I was a failure as a person or a bad photographer. It just meant I was learning. (There were certainly times, earlier in my life that I would have felt that I was a failure when I failed at something.) Anyone who gets up and dusts themselves off and keeps trying is not a failure, you are human. And, hey, you might learn something great in the process of trying again and again - like how to perfectly soft-boil and egg, use unusual herbs and spices, or make egg-less macarons (someone thought WAY outside of the box when they figured that out).
Also keep in mind that things that trigger us are trying to teach us areas we need to shine a light on in ourselves. When I get defensive about something, I ask myself, "what am I protecting"?
So, this post is a fervent thank you to my failed images that gave me an opportunity to keep learning so I could be a more skilled and a more well-rounded photographer (even after almost 20 years in the field).
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