And failure get to our heart? This thought was triggered by a dialog from a movie I was watching recently. The actual dialog was and I quote “Never let success get to your head and failure get to your heart”.
Recently I bought a lens that is one of a kind. It was a preowned Minolta 500mm f8 auto focus lens. It is called a mirror lens. In other words, it is essentially a telescope with a camera mount. Also known as catadioptric lenses or “cats”. What makes this lens unique is that it has auto focus system. There are many manufacturers that make a mirror lens of this kind but none make it with auto focus mechanism in it. From the get go I was not getting the kind of images that I have seen others posted on the photography fora and I was so discouraged that I stopped using it and chalked the whole episode as a learning experience. So I took my failure to my heart.
Here are couple of examples from a forum I regularly visit and the photos are reproduced here with the permission of the photographer, who talent and knowledge I respect a lot.
Here is my attempt at it. As you can see how bad my images are with the same lens.
Here is another example. As you can see these are not exactly what I can say good enough to compare to the images above from my friend.
I expressed my frustration the forum thread and also studied the images from few other posters including information like shutter speed, ISO value and technique. Soon I was having success to the extend that the images became satisfactory to me. Here is the example of my latest endeavor that was immensely satisfying to me, as I feel I conquered the mountain. This image is a crop from the full frame and I am extremely pleased with the details.
The lesson learned is that I should let the success get to heart and failure to head. As much as it sounds like a cliche, this aha moment has changed my perspective of day to day living. When I have “success”, I enjoy the moment, and when I am faced with a “failure”, it gives me a renewed purpose to learn from the “failure” and better my self.
