Is Failure the Secret to Better Photography?

As photographers, we plan our shoots. Anyone photographing outside will check weather, sunrise or sunset times, and try to understand anything else that might impact getting a good image. But do you ever plan to fail?

How We Learn Through Failure

We like to think we learn from our successes. And sometimes we do. But it’s much harder than we realize. Success feels good, and because it feels good, we don’t always question it. We don’t always analyze why a particular photograph worked, breaking it down and taking into account all possible factors. Instead, we tend to assume it was our skill, our vision, or our instincts that led to that good outcome. Rarely do we ask if luck played a role, or if making a different choice for one aspect of that photo could have made the result even better.

Failure, however, forces us to ask those questions. When something goes wrong, when a photo falls flat, we take a closer look. We analyze. We pick apart the composition, the light, the moment, and try to understand where we went astray. Answering these questions is where real learning happens, whether working with a success or a failure. It just so happens that our brains are set up to remember negative experiences more than positive ones. This is an unfortunate evolutionary hack, which helped keep our ancestors unharmed: forgetting a safe experience didn’t hurt in the long run, but remembering a dangerous one kept that individual alive!

Being “wrong” doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophic disaster, however. In photography, failure is usually much smaller—an image that doesn’t quite work, a composition that doesn’t hold together, an exposure that misses the mark, not seeing those trees sneaking in the side of the frame. It’s the moment we look at a photo and feel a certain disappointment, the quiet realization that it isn’t what we had hoped. For the sake of this discussion, any time we see possible improvements on a photograph that we like isn’t a failure. Rather, a failure is when we don’t like the image we captured at all; it is not communicating what we had hoped, not showing the scene we were intending to convey. If we use these moments well, they become stepping stones on our journey, turning a negative experience into an overall positive.

Planning to Fail

If failure can be so helpful, how do we harness it? The simplest answer is to invite it in. Rather than waiting for failure to happen, for when it can hurt us the most, we can create situations where we expect it. Make failure a part of the plan.

Recently, I went through an exercise designed to do just that. I went for a walk, and every minute, I took a photo without lifting the camera to my eye. As expected, the resulting images weren’t great. Most were awkwardly framed, some entirely meaningless and full of clutter. The lighting was generally terrible, too. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to free myself from the constraints of trying to create the “perfect photograph,” to change my relationship with my photography in a small and subtle way. I felt a different type of enjoyment and curiosity as I snapped the 15 images for the exercise, not knowing what the results would be and wondering just how close they would end up to what I saw.

The photos from my exercise, flawed as they were, showed me something about how I see landscapes, how my eye is drawn to certain shapes or patterns. Some had the early signs of good compositions, buried within their failures. Others were empty, completely devoid of potential. But that, too, was part of the learning process. Reviewing the photos gave me the opportunity to reflect on what failure means to me, and to think more deeply about my photography on the whole.

This kind of intentional failure isn’t limited to one exercise, of course. You can build it into your photography in countless ways. Use a lens you aren’t comfortable with. Shoot in a style that isn’t your own. Or go for a walk and take a photo every minute! The specifics don’t matter as much as the mindset—stepping outside your comfort zone, or even the boundaries of a reasonable photographic process. Embrace that most of what you shoot won’t be good, and look carefully at the results to see what they reveal. Doing so will feed your brain with failures, opening up new learning avenues.

Concerns About Time

Of course, there’s a challenge with planning to fail: time. For many of us, time with a camera is precious. If we only get a handful of opportunities to go out and shoot, it can feel wasteful to spend one of them deliberately making bad photos. If we have only an hour or two at sunrise, or a weekend trip to a beautiful location, we want to make the most of it. We want to succeed.

One solution is to clearly separate the two processes. You don’t have to sacrifice your dedicated photography outings to failure. Instead, find other moments in your day to practice failing. Maybe it’s during your commute, or on a walk through your neighborhood. Maybe it’s ten minutes in your backyard. These moments aren’t meant to produce portfolio-worthy images. Their purpose is different—they’re for exploration, for testing, for stretching your vision.

Alternatively, you could dedicate 10–20 minutes at the start or end of a photography outing to creating failures, and seeing how they compare with your successes from the same trip! Maybe walking to your location, you take a handful of images without looking at your camera, and it even serves as a warm-up for the photos you’re hoping to create. The thing to be careful of if you choose this approach is keeping your mindsets very clear and discrete: let go and fail when it’s time to fail, and focus on your typical approach when creating the images you went out for. Don’t try to succeed at failing, or to fail while looking to succeed!

Final Thoughts

Ironically, the more you embrace failure in these small ways, the more you’ll find that it helps you succeed when the stakes feel higher. You’ll start to notice patterns in what doesn’t work, and in doing so, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what does. You’ll become better versed at looking at your photos to see what isn’t working, as well as what is. You may even start to feel looser and more relaxed, as failure stops being discouraging. Instead, it becomes one of your best teachers.