What I Am Not Good At.
There was a camera in our house when I was growing up. A film camera. My parents'. And I was not allowed to touch it. I understood this, in the way children understand rules they don't fully agree with. It was expensive. It was fragile. It was not mine. What I was allowed to do was hold the bag it was kept in. Just the empty bag. I remember the texture of it. The shape of the space where the camera sat. The weight of something that wasn't there.
That camera felt like a mystery I was never quite given access to. And in a way, that's still true. Because film photography, the medium my parents once used so naturally, is one of the things I have never properly learnt.
Why This Matters
Every photographer has a version of this list. The techniques they never mastered. The equipment that never felt natural. The entire branches of the craft they quietly walked away from without making a formal announcement about it. Most people don't talk about it. The industry runs on confidence, or at least the performance of it. So you emphasise what you do well and hope nobody asks about the rest. I did this for years. Not dishonestly. More like selective presentation.
But knowing precisely what you're not good at is one of the most useful things you can know about yourself. Not so you can fix it or apologise for it. But so you can stop wasting energy on it and redirect it toward the things you actually do well. The things that, with enough time, become genuinely uncommon strengths rather than merely adequate ones.
The Things That Don't Fit
Film and studios have the same problem for me, which is that they both require surrendering the thing I work best with. Film asks you to take a shot and not know what you have until later. Until the chemistry has done its work and the image finally shows itself. The unpredictability is, I understand, the point for a lot of photographers, the grain, the accidents, the quality of light digital still hasn't quite replicated. I appreciate that in principle. In practice it was just uncertainty I couldn't do anything useful with. I like seeing immediately whether I've got what I came for. That feedback loop suits how I think.
Studios have the opposite problem. Not uncertainty, but control, and too much of it. The contained space, everything managed and deliberate, multiple people with multiple opinions about exactly how the light should fall. My best work happens when I'm responding to conditions I didn't create. When the light does something unexpected and I'm there to catch it. When an animal behaves in a way I didn't anticipate and the photograph exists because I was paying attention. You cannot replicate that indoors, under artificial light, with everything arranged in advance. Two different failure modes. The same underlying issue. Both require a kind of seeing I don't have.
Film Making
Film making is the one I find hardest to talk about. Not because it's embarrassing. But because it represents the clearest example of something that simply does not work with the way my brain is built. I cannot picture sequences. I cannot think in the way moving image requires, forward and backward through time simultaneously, holding the structure of something in your mind before you've made it. Still photography suits me precisely because each image is complete in itself. The frame is the frame. You make one decision, in one moment, and either you got it or you didn't.
During my first degree I had two compulsory film making modules. I was, I think, the only person in the cohort who said plainly when asked that I did not want to do this. Not as a complaint. Just as a quiet, honest statement of fact. The person running those modules was wonderful about it. She didn't treat my reluctance as a problem to be overcome. She guided me toward what I needed to pass and nothing beyond that. To get through it with my dignity intact. I think about that sometimes when I'm working with clients who are nervous about being photographed. Who are there because they feel they should be, not because they want to be. The difference it makes, being met where you actually are rather than where someone thinks you should be. She taught me that without meaning to.
The Attenborough Problem
Because I struggle so much with film, I watch natural history documentaries differently now. When I watch those programmes, I'm not thinking about the narration. I'm thinking about the camera crews. The people who spent weeks in a hide waiting for a behaviour that might not happen. Who came back the next day and the day after that, carrying the shape of the whole thing in their heads across weeks and months and seasons.
That's not my kind of patience. My patience is the patience of waiting for a horse to relax. Of sitting on frozen ground for forty minutes waiting for light. Present, contained, specific. A single frame worth waiting for.
The patience those crews carry is structural. Long. Shaped around months rather than moments. I couldn't sustain it. And knowing that, really knowing it, from having tried rather than just assuming, means I watch those programmes with something closer to awe. You see the craft differently when you understand what it costs. When you've touched the edges of something and found where your reach ends.
The Wrong Shape
The things I'm not good at have a particular quality. They don't grow when I give them time. I come back to them and they're still the same size they were before, still slightly wrong-shaped for how I think. Some things don't develop because the ground isn't right for them, and no amount of effort changes the ground. That's not failure. That's just accurate information about what you are.
Every hour spent on the things that don't grow is an hour not spent on the things that do. The film modules were never going to become a strength. The studio was never going to feel like home. Accepting that without apology meant I had everything I needed for the mud, the animals, and the light.
What's on your list? Most people treat it as evidence of inadequacy. It isn't. It's a map. And the sooner you read it honestly, the sooner you know where you're actually going.
Listen to Episode Ten: What I Am not Good At →
The full story, told properly. Including the parts that don't make me look good.
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