I remember them all.
There was a guy tailing me very closely on a stretch of road in Aiken, South Carolina. I was already going above the speed limit, but he wasn’t letting me go. There were no ways to escape, I was trapped on this stretch of road.
I needed to get away. The sky was becoming blood red, and it was going to be dark soon. But there was nowhere to go.
As I drove, I saw ducks landing in a wet field as the blood red sky reflected off of it. Still nowhere to go. Keep driving.
His headlights blinded me as they reflected off my rearview mirror. It was getting and harder to see the road ahead. But I couldn’t slow down.
I squinted my eyes, and suddenly, a beacon of safety lights the way ahead. It was a bright signal shaped like a lion.
A Food Lion.
I quickly pull off in order to get this lunatic off my tail. He continues down the stretch of road and disappears into the distance.
I park to take a breath. The blood red sky begins to pique.
I remember them all. That glassy duck pond during a blood red sunset, a weird cloud phenomenon that I could have watched on Lake Hartwell but had to experience from a Target parking lot. A snowy mountain view from a hill in Ducktown that it just wasn’t safe to attempt, a foggy morning on the Chattooga river where I just couldn’t get the right angle. Every image that could have been, but I missed. Whether I was being chased, or there was nowhere to pull over, I remember every photo I’ve ever missed.
There I am, thinking about how I could potentially get back to that duck pond, the one with perfect bird silhouettes against a brightly colored sky, but I know the truth. This is it. This one of a kind sunset will only be experienced here, in this Food Lion parking lot.
If you’re a photographer listening to this, you’ve been here before.
The purgatory of the grocery store parking lot is familiar to all of us that take this path in life. It is our lot.
Maybe we hike through the night to summit a peak in Colorado, and you get to the top waiting to bask in the light of the morning sun, and it never comes. You’re faced with the gray of a gloomy day. Then, defeated, you hike back down, and get to the grocery store to pick up dinner before nightfall. There, there is where you will be met with glory.
The first time I took note of this phenomenon was in the Ingles parking lot in Murphy, NC in 2011, (I believe it was the same grocery store where bomber Eric Rudolph was caught in the dumpster rummaging through trash in 2003) and I still remember that sunset to this day.
Disappointment is part of the photography game. If you’ve never felt that sickening feeling in your gut after a session, you’re not a real photographer.
The disappointment makes the successes sweeter.
You’re sitting down to edit a shot you absolutely nailed, then you open it on your big computer monitor, only to find out, it’s out of focus.
You, without thinking, format your memory card before importing them to your hardrive. You throw up out stress as you furiously google search for recovery software.
Maybe you shot a roll of film you know is going to be killer, and you get it back from the lab, totally blank.
We have all felt these things before. Maybe it’s a sickening feeling in our gut, maybe it’s the embarrassment from having to tell a client we messed up the session they paid for.
These are the moments where we feel like we have totally failed. We feel like we are at the absolute bottom of our game. Like we need to turn in our photographer licenses, they found us out, the jig is up.
But It’s going to be okay.
EVERYONE feels disappointed at some point in this game. That’s what makes the great images so thrilling.