About Procrastination

[Michael Graves]

Shot this with the digital in the spring. I kept meaning to go back with the 5x7 to get a "decent" shot. So this past weekend, thinking it would look great in the fresh snow, I packed up the Toyo and headed out.

It was gone. A new housing complex is going up where it used to be. Guess I waited too long.

[vinny]

Those cookie cutter homes will be more interesting when they're finished. It's too bad that new communities don't have any character anymore.

[paulr]

yeah, i've been hit with that lesson many times. i realized that many of my favorite subjects are areas in transition, so if there's something there that interests me i'd better pounce.

the worst example was an old roller coaster at coney island ... abandoned for years, with trees growing up through it. every time i saw it i thought "one day ... "

but then one day i learned it was gone. will be replaced with (of course) a cookie cutter apartment complex.

[Richard M. Coda]

The converse can be true, as well. Taking a photo of something, and then you go by it again (days/weeks/years) later - and it is gone and/or has been replaced. Usually a great feeling of sadness comes over me even though I "did" get the shot.

[Kirk Gittings]

Michael, the subject matter I have lost because of procrastination and extreme pickiness (the light wasn't perfect) are the ones which haunt me the most. A real sense of loss.

[Oren Grad]

But transitions are interesting too, and construction can be as much fun to photograph as stereotypically picturesque old stuff.

[Jim Fitzgerald]

I am learning that if I see it I better stop and do it right then. Problem then becomes film and time.

Jim

[Charles Carstensen]

Same here. If you are there - photograph it. Nothing is perfect. We photographers are always thinking we can do better. Thanks to the likes of Photoshop we can still get creative in the digital darkroom.

[Brian Ellis]

I've always liked Ruth Bernhard's saying when it comes to thinking about making a photograph or maybe just moving on and coming back later: "Today is the day, now is the time."

[Michael Graves]

I've always liked Ruth Bernhard's saying when it comes to thinking about making a photograph or maybe just moving on and coming back later: "Today is the day, now is the time."

I love Ruth Bernhard. I did my senior thesis on the evolution of her work. I did the best I could "grabbing the moment" with the equipment I had with me. Then life got in the way. A couple of book deadlines and the day job....all the usual excuses. Kirk is right. The ones that get away linger the longest. Years ago I showed up with my 4x5 to photograph a 1930's football stadium in Phoenix before they tore it down to make room for a shopping center. It was scheduled to meet the wrecking ball the following week.

However, somebody had decided to push up the schedule and I arrived to see a pile of rubble and trucks lined up to haul it off. Can't call that one procrastination....but the effect was the same.

[Diane Maher]

I had a similar occurrence. In 2006 there was a series of two very nasty storms that blew through the area two days apart. Two of four of these big red and white steel radio towers were blown over by the wind. I noticed the wreckage when I was going to see what had happened in this one area I was shooting. It was amazing to see one of them flattened on the ground and the second one looked like someone balled it up and threw it on the ground. I always meant to get back there with my panoramic and procrastinated until I went out there with a 6x9 cm camera six months or so later and they had been cleaned up. :( All that was left was the concrete pad where they had been secured to the ground. I took a picture of the area anyway since I was there.

[Scott Knowles]

We all can relate to this, the local becomes so common to your world we don't see it until it's gone. This was the last building of a homestead on the highway to the Nisqually entrance to Mt. Rainier NP. I drove by it so often and told myself to photograph it, and didn't, until one day I did. And two years later it was gone, the whole several hundred acre site to be a resort with a golf course. This is the only photo I took.

[riooso]

I live in a farming community and this house was built by immigrants from Switzerland and had character and a natural place in the community. That was last year, now it has been replaced by a modular trailer thingy with white gravel surrounding it and no vegetation within 500 feet. I am glad to at least get a record of someone's pride and joy when they move into it some years back.

Richard

[Kirk Gittings]

And now the other side of the coin. A few years back when I had an NEA grant to document historic New Mexico churches, I was called because a severe rain had caused the collapse of a transept wall on a church that I had not documented yet. It was about 10 days before I could get free to drive up there. To my surprise and disappointment, the whole church had been leveled. I had gotten there too late. But in the tracks of the bulldozer, I found a latin choir book open to a requiem mass. The resulting image became an icon for the preservation of these churches and my second most reproduced and selling image of all time.

Procrastination led me to one of my most important images.

[Michael Graves]

Kirk, you never cease to amaze me. How anyone can get a marvelous image from a damaged book is beyond me.

[Tony Karnezis]

Michael, the subject matter I have lost because of procrastination and extreme pickiness (the light wasn't perfect) are the ones which haunt me the most. A real sense of loss.

My biggest photographic regret? One day, while living in New York, I spent the morning photographing the Brooklyn Bridge--my first time on this wonderful monument. The sky wasn't that interesting, so I focused more on the bridge, not the surrounding cityscape--i.e. the World Trade Center--that is withing its panorama. The next day, the towers fell.

[Don Sparks]

"We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory." Henri Cartier-Bresson

[Richard M. Coda]

I DID get this photo (not LF, though) on Sept. 13, 1981, 2 days shy of 20 years before the towers fell. I used to work there and met my wife there. Had gone in for San Genaro and took this shot in the center of the plaza after getting off the PATH trains. Sky was so overexposed I didn't think I could ever print it so it went into a box. 20 years later I remembered I had the negative and had it drum scanned, fixed the sky, and now have a beautiful print to remember them by. Although, it does bring great sadness every time I view it.

[Pat Kearns]

The movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" was filmed in Mississippi and the last scene shows George Clooney leading his family across a railroad crossing on the outskirts of town. There is an old wooden tressle in the background that caught my eye. An aunt of mine had a friend with the Mississippi Film Commission Office and they told her the location. She emailed me the location and I did a google search and there was the tressle. Two weeks later she phoned and asked if I had gone to photograph it. I said I was planning to do so Thanksgiving weekend. She then gave me the sad news that it had been demolished that afternoon. It's like the old saying, "You snooze, you lose".:(