Blog #24 - When I Ballsed It Up

I spent a Saturday at an American football match. I was there as a paramedic, not a photographer, but I had permission to take a few photos during warm ups. I had my Sony with me and the 70 to 200 f2.8 GM, and I thought it would be a good chance to try something new. I have photographed a fair amount this year, but nothing quite like American football, so I felt a quiet bit of excitement building as I walked up the sideline. The light was bright. The pitch looked good. The players were moving at a steady pace. Nothing too challenging. I set a low ISO, adjusted my shutter speed for the action in front of me, lifted the camera, and started shooting.

I take my glasses off when I use the viewfinder because I cannot get close enough with them on. The diopter on the Sony helps a lot, so once my eye is against the viewfinder it feels fine. The trouble is that I rely on the rear screen when I want a quick check. I do that without my glasses, so everything looks sharp enough even when it is not sharp at all. At the time I convinced myself the shots looked great. The players were running drills, stretching, jogging, and I felt like I was finally adding something different to my portfolio. I took about eighty frames, then put the camera away and got back into paramedic mode.

Obligatory Arctic selfie intended to visually demonstrate my requirement for glasses.

Hours later, when I got home, I made a cup of tea, opened Lightroom, and began to import the images. The excitement lasted only a few seconds. Every single photo was blurred beyond saving. Not a gentle softness. Not a hint of motion that feels intentional. Fully blurred. Unusable. Only one frame had survived in a way that could be classed as barely acceptable. I had definitely ballsed it up.

I sat there staring at the screen, trying to understand what I had done wrong. I had used the lens before. I trusted it. The players were not moving particularly fast. The daylight had been fine. It felt like everything should have worked. I went through the metadata and saw the answer staring back at me. Aperture f10. I honestly still do not know when I knocked the dial to f10 because I rarely shoot sport at anything higher than f4 or f5. With the aperture that narrow the camera was starved of light, and the shutter speed had slowed down to compensate. Slow shutter speed with running players means motion blur across the entire set.

It should have been a one off. Something to shrug at. Something to file under beginner mistakes and move on. A week later it happened again. This time at the C3 arts market at Phoenix. Different setting. Indoors. Dimmer. More controlled. I was using the Fujifilm for some of it, which usually protects me from errors because the exposure preview tells you exactly what you are doing. Even then, I still came away with shots that were softer than they should have been. Not a total disaster like the American football batch, but still far from what I had hoped for.

At that point I realised there was a pattern. Part of it is the time of year. Winter slowly pulls the light down earlier and earlier, but you never quite notice until you ruin something. You step outside or into a hall and assume the light is roughly what it was a month ago. You trust that the settings you use often will still work. You make small assumptions. You convince yourself that things feel about right. That kind of thinking collapses the moment the light shifts. All it takes is an overcast sky, a darker wall, or an unexpected shadow and the whole setup fails.

The other part of the pattern is my relationship with my glasses. I started wearing them early in 2024 and I still feel new to it. I take them off to shoot so I can get my eye close to the viewfinder. That part is fine. The diopters on both cameras make the viewfinder clear enough to work with. The real problem comes when I review images without my glasses. The rear screen becomes a tiny glowing rectangle of optimism. Everything looks sharp enough because I cannot actually see the details. It is only when I get home and load the images onto a proper screen that the truth shows itself. By then it is too late.

Once I pieced those things together the story shifted from embarrassment to something more useful. It was not the camera failing. It was not the lens having a bad day. It was me relying on instinct when I have not yet earned the right to trust instinct on its own. I am not Ansel Adams. I am one year into taking photography seriously and still very much learning how the basics work in real time. I need to keep reading the frame, checking the settings, checking them again, and staying deliberate. That is the part that keeps you honest. I had drifted into habits that made me feel comfortable without realising they were slowly putting me at risk of exactly what happened.

So I have started building a new routine. When the camera comes out I check white balance, ISO, aperture, then shutter speed, every time. It sounds simple enough, but I had stopped doing it consistently. I used to go through those steps every time I picked up the camera, but somewhere along the way I assumed I could skip them. I let the camera do more thinking than I should have. Taking a moment to run through that small list forces me to slow down and pay attention. It puts me back in the frame instead of coasting along on what feels familiar.

The whole thing has made me think about the wider journey I have been on this past year. I have gone from someone who owned a camera to someone who lives with one. I have tested film cameras from the fifties. I have shot landscapes, portraits, wildlife, street work, and now a bit of sport. I have written about mistakes, lessons, surprises, and the strange mix of confidence and uncertainty that comes with learning something as complex and intuitive as photography. This mistake fits neatly into that arc. It is frustrating, but it is also part of the learning curve. You cannot build a genuine skill without walking straight into situations that humble you.

When I think about the American football match now I do not feel annoyed at the players running or the light shifting or the lens doing what lenses do. I feel annoyed because I know I could have avoided it with a little more presence. I could have checked the aperture. I could have checked the shutter speed. I could have put my glasses back on for a second and zoomed in on the preview. It was not a technical disaster. It was a tiny moment of drifting. Moments like that are the ones that matter because they reveal what habits you need to strengthen.

The C3 market mistake confirmed all of this. I walked in with the same mindset, trusted the screen, trusted my memory of the room from the last event, and forgot how quickly indoor lighting can trick you. Again, nothing dramatic. Just a reminder that I am still a student in all of this.

I think that is what I find most important about the whole episode. Learning only works when you stay open to the idea that you have not mastered anything. You can be close to it one minute and miles away the next. Photography rewards attention and presence, not confidence alone. The more I think about it the more I see these mistakes as a way of keeping the ego in check. They remind me that every frame is a choice and the camera only does what you tell it to do.

There will be more American football. I want to go back and do it properly. I want that moment where I look at the files and know that I learned something from the day everything went wrong. I want to be able to point at the photos from next season and say that this was the turning point. It is strange how mistakes sometimes sharpen your interest more than successes. They grab you in a way that makes you want to fix them. They make you curious again.

For now, this sits in the growing list of lessons from my first year of taking photography seriously. It is not the most dramatic story, but it is one of those moments that sticks with you. A quiet reminder to slow down, look properly, check the numbers, and accept that learning is never tidy. It stumbles. It repeats itself. It drifts. And then, on a better day, it clicks again.

And when it clicks, you remember why you bothered in the first place.