Then and now
When I started street photography, I soon discovered that underground stations provide amazing opportunities to shoot. I've found a great station where light and geometry meet in a perfect way. I took the shot, and after I edited it, I posted it on social media. This was the first shot that gained more serious attention. Bigger hubs featured it, I received many dm's and, of course, many comments.
Behind the scenes, while I was happy that many people liked it, I knew that, to some extent, that shot was a failure. My settings were all over the place, and I didn't have the patience to wait for the right subject to appear. So, the photograph needed serious editing.
This is the older photograph:
The aperture was f/16 to have enough depth of field, the shutter speed was ok, but the ISO was way higher than necessary, around 8000. I was excited to load it into Lightroom at that time, and as I saw the RAW file, I was disappointed.
Started to edit the picture and did multiple masking, adjusting the contrast, the clarity, and the shadows on almost all of the mask layers. Here's a small breakdown of what I did:
The funny thing is, still, many people like it, but I've grown to dislike it, as I see the mistakes much more than the final result.
Fast forward to today
After almost 2 years, I decided to go back to that location to search for some shots, and thought about taking almost the same shot, but now, with proper settings. I had the vision when I started, but haven't figured out how to quickly and many times patiently react in street photography.
The main differences this time:
I used the proper camera settings - 1/500, f5.6, ISO 200
I had the patience to wait for a subject that pops in front of the dark grey background.
The editing process took me about a minute to finish, as I just tamed the highlights a bit, adjusted the shadows and the blacks and added a little vignette.
This is the shot:
Lesson learned
Like so many others, I hate to fail. But it happens. In street photography, many times. Now I think I learned to embrace this failure and try to use it as a driving force to learn more, to go out and shoot more. For me, to see even the biggest names fail to get the shot sometimes, give me the license to screw up, fail and learn from it.