Graham Maverick from the Joffrey Ballet probably couldn't make his hands look ugly if he tried.
Most other people can.
And they do.
And while you're peering through the lens focusing on eyes, those hands may be totally ruining your shot.
No matter how good the rest of the image may be.
So this post is partly about hands but the real message is about paying attention to detail, firstly when looking through the camera, and then when editing.
Removing the plastic bag in the corner.
Or the bottle cap in the otherwise perfect image of that rare tree frog. (Assuming the rules of the competition or your intermal moral compass allows.)
Whatever.
Small things can ruin great pictures.
I loved this picture of Chicago portrait photographer Kambua Chema (www.kambuaphotography.com) straight out of the camera.
I took it into Lightroom, gave it "my" look and was even more in love with it.
Then I looked at THE HANDS!!
WTAF has gone on there??
And those hands made the photo a cute artefact but entirely unuseable.
What has gone on there is that the depth of field is sooooo shallow (F 1.3) that Kambua's right eye is completely in focus but even the Leica logo on her camera, which is literally just a finger length away, is entirely out of focus.
And that was the creative intent.
Score!!
BUT what I hadn't noticed is that the strap on her camera was intertwined with her fingers and looked entirely the same as her fingers with the lack of colour and shallow depth.
So, from the chin down, the fabulous Kambua looks like an alien from a bad 70s horror pic.
And that's a complete fail.
In early 2022, my neighbour up at the farm had his house flooded by the 2021/2022 great wet in Australia. That's Andy in the blue shirt on the right. (He also very nearly had the same house burnt to the ground in the 2019/2020 great fire-but that's another story)
The next weekend 40 of his friends, and some randos, turned up to help him start rebuilding.
I turned up to help and do a photo journalism piece on community in action and/or to create a photobook to give to the people who turned up.
Again, straight off the bat this was the hero image. The lead picture that told the whole story.
And I loved it to death, gave it an olde skoole film feel, like the rest of the series, and was generally delighted.
But let's look a little closer.
It was only when I started showing it to people that somone noticed the totally fatal flaw.
And it is totally fatal.
Shay, forground with the ponytail, has a beer in her left hand and is shaking Andy's hand with.......her other left hand.
In perfect alignment so you can't see them, is person no.3 in the shot shaking Andy's hand in front of the elegantly out of focus background.
And as soon as you notice that, you also notice that the eyelines are completely wrong.
Now the thing is that I probably couldn't replicate these 2 photos in a million years, but in a way they aren't one off problems.
The problem is not paying attention.
The difference between a great photo and a good one may be highly subjective
But when a photograph is just plain wrong, it's just plain wrong.
And hands can be the root cause of a lot of wrongness.
But really, hands are just another example of paying attention and trying to see the photograph as it actually appears and not as your mind's eye tells you it appears.
Or the way you saw it.