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Allow me to share an experience I had from a recent portrait session. My wife and I shot a family in Austin back in early November. The little boy was 15 months old and walking just fine. Typically, when we photograph children that are older than newborns, we like to at least incorporate some outdoor settings into the shoot. Since we have a photojournalist style of photography, we decided to make the focal point of the session a playground where the family could play and we could capture the fun.

Let me start by saying that shooting people on swings is really difficult. Sure if they’re not moving then everything is great. But focusing on a target that is moving back to front is an acquired skill. Autofocus is out. Manual focus is the only way. I like to find a focus point, stand still, and wait for the person to swing through that depth-of-field and try to hit the shutter at precisely that moment. It works pretty well, but I still toss out about 30 percent of the shots because the focus is off. The wider the aperture, the harder this gets. Too bad I like wide apertures…

Then there was this shot. I don’t remember what I said, but it made all three bust out laughing. I’ve learned that to get that one great shot, sometimes you just have to go for it and the technical stuff be damned. There was no time to refocus; the moment would have passed. So I shut up and took the picture. The focus is off and the whole shot is soft.

When we were going through the shots from the session, we almost tossed this photo because of the focus. Instead, we recognized it as a capture of a family’s fun moment with a technical flaw. We decided to keep the photo and present it to the clients. Turns out they loved it. It ended up being one of the featured images in a custom designed 8×10 inch press printed book we made for them. Once they saw it, they ordered five copies as Christmas gifts. This made me especially happy I just took the picture.

So the moral of the story? You can pick apart your images from a technical standpoint all day long. You can put them on forums and let others shoot them down. But don’t forget to look beyond focus, white balance, and other details at what the photo really says. Sure, you should strive for technical perfection, but don’t let it hinder you. If I put this photo on a forum, it would probably be shredded as a horrible failure. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, because the clients loved it, and bought lots of them.

The post-processing on this image was done in Lightroom and Matt Kloskowski’s “Vintage New York” preset was applied to get the unique color scheme. You can get the preset over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.