Shooting without thinking

Shooting without thinking has its advantages: you capture the inspiration of a moment. But in the instantaneous act it's easy to miss things.

This photo is a good example of that. I saw the floor and the narrowing of perspective and it caught my eye. But I made a mistake: I didn't compose the scene and that had a big knock on effect.

By not composing I made the surrounding doorframe too big a feature. So that led to me cropping it out. By being at an angle when I took the photo that led to the photo being angled towards the windows which makes the photo look unbalanced post-crop. I also don't have a good focus point, so the photo isn't focused on either of the most interesting features: the floor or the lights.

With too much out of kilter, there isn't really anything that can be done to rescue the shot in Lightroom. But editing this photo has been a reminder about stopping and thinking a little.

The trick, perhaps, is in having an instantaneous eye to see the shot and a slow shutter finger to capture what the eye's seen well.