"good enough" what does it mean to you ?

[Alan Gales]

I recently shot my Father-in-law's birthday at a local restaurant with a digital Fujifilm X-100s and the built in flash. The restaurant was typically dark with a large group seated around the table. When shooting the people on one side of the table with their backs to the wall the photos came out quite nice. Shooting the people on the other side of the table was hard to get the same exposure with everyone due to my position with the flash. After cropping and fixing red eye in a couple shots the prints turned out nice and everyone was thrilled with them. I'd say the results were "good enough".

Now when shooting large format, doing the best I possibly can is "good enough" and sometimes it isn't "good enough".

[Bill_1856]

I can't always tell when stuff is "good enough," but I can usually tell when it AIN'T. That's the stuff that gets thrown away (or deleted). Other stuff needs to be looked at again in a few weeks or so.
"Family stuff" is ALWAYS good enough, and should NEVER be thrown away.

[jnantz]

For me, photographically, there is no such thing. It's either right or it isn't. Further, when speaking about things that matter, the words suggest everything that has gone awry with the American culture. They are offensive.

Lenny

hi lenny

i ddin't mean to offend you ...
in a sense every work of art can be considered "unfinished" because something can always be done to improve whatever it might be ..
when whoever made whatever it mght have been and stopped at a certain point, that was when it was good enough to stop.
i live down the road from the gilbert stuart birthplace. it was a snuff mill, and he was a painter. his unfinished portrait of george washington graces our 1$ bill ..
and it was unfinished ... and clearly was good enough as an unfinished work to become priceless.

where i stand is in between the obsessive camp and the other side. i know i could always work on something and never finish it and a certain point i think it is good enough and stop before i continue
to waste more time and effort maybe not even making the finished image any better than it was before i decided to continue ... many of my exposures are not good enough, and i have to make up for lost time
on the other end ... and often times those results are not good enough either ...

[Alan Gales]

"Family stuff" is ALWAYS good enough, and should NEVER be thrown away.

Even if you accidently cut their heads off in the shot?

[John Kasaian]

Depends on a few things.
F8 and be there means (to me) getting an image. Not a perfect image but an image from a time and place where perfect conditions simply aren't going to happen. If an image is interesting enough, I figure imperfections only bear witness to the difficulty of the task so I don't worry about it.
With equipment I'm afraid I'm nearly as cavalier. It doesn't matter if my lens is an antique 100 years old or a modern 50 years old lens--if it's capable of good images that's really what matters most to me---it's "good enough" and I won't stop shooting until I can get a new mortgage to finance the latest glass from B and H---I feel I am more than capable of taking bad photos with the most expensive gear on the planet. It's a knack I have
With negatives and prints I try to do the best I can---anything less isn't "good enough."
I agree that it is easy to over react as mdm mentions above.
I made prints of a 10th Century Spanish Cistercian Chapter House that had an oddly shaped white blemish on every print. I couldn't figure out the cause and nearly attempted to spot it (it was a huge spot) until I realized it was light from a slit window.That how it was supposed to look and if I tried to remove it from my prints, it wouldn't be, well, veritas.

[Nodda Duma]

Lenny good description. Now the other side of engineering in this respect can be summed up by the saying "There comes a point in every project when you must shoot the engineer and begin production."

[Tin Can]

Lenny good description. Now the other side of engineering in this respect can be summed up by the saying "There comes a point in every project when you must shoot the engineer and begin production."

+1 Million

[Drew Bedo]

"Good Enough" Correction for Bellows Wztension:

To correct for bellows extension, onwe must properly measure the distance from the film plabe to the primary node of the lens. and apply the formula.

I frequently use a 150 mm lens0151which is about six inches. I measure from GG to the front of the lens board. For every inch of extension beyond six inches I allow an additional one third of a stop of extra exposure.

that is close enough for most shots I take.

[Chance2]

That I'm free to move on to the next photo.

[Tin Can]

From another LFPF thread about enlarging.

"It doesn’t matter how you get there, if you don’t know where you’re going.
—The Flying Karamazov Brothers"