On failure

Numbers, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

A Photo Editor has an interesting posting about professional phtographers' work, how even them sometimes fail to do the job: "When I worked at a magazine, every month a couple of the shoots we assigned would fail. Fail to meet our standards, fail to be interesting, fail to capture what we were looking for."

This posting was an extremely interesting view on how various reasons - mostly not technical problems - result in non-publishable work. I can definitely understand this, as in my writing career every once in a while I get a reject decision.

Almost always the reason is that the text is not suitable for the publication - sometimes it might be suitable but there are already enough texts to run, and sometimes I have missed the essential point and produced trivialities. But most often the reason was that my text just didn't fit into the profile of the publication.

These days, I get rejected texts only rarely, but they used to be quite common when I was starting. I don't think I have much developed as a writer, but mostly I know better what the editors want and what the profile of a certain publication is. Also, I'm probably playing it much more safe these days, not trying to offer a text which even I think are marginal - these would result in a reject in any case.

Returning to photography - I managed to do a short walk just before sunset. A sign by the roadside was badly treated, perhaps even worth a photo. Reject or not?