Dare to suck
is, for all intents and purposes, my friend Pete’s
motto. I’ve been playing Irish music with Pete since about 2010, and
for as long as I’ve known him, he has encouraged people in his
seisiúns to
dare to suck. (I recently learned the phrase did not originate with
Pete, I believe it came from someone else he used to play with before
my time.) He says it to newcomers to encourage them to lead tunes when
they’re reticent; he says it of himself and other more experienced
players when a set of tunes — as they are wont to do — crashes and
burns. It’s even spreading to other seisiúns via people like me and
our friend Isele who know Pete and play with him regularly.
The idea is that even those of us who have been playing for a while mess up, and the only way any of us improve is by trying and, sometimes, failing. It is also an acknowledgement that it takes more courage to try something you’re not sure you can do, then to do something you’re confident you can do.
I think about it often — most recently because I have switched back to shooting RAW images on my camera. For the past six years or more, I’ve been using film simulation recipes from sources such as Fuji X Weekly. Film recipes are a fun way to shoot on a Fujifilm camera (Fujifilm’s cameras have great JPEG processing). It’s kind of like shooting with film: you pick a recipe, set your exposure, take the photo, and you get what you get. You take the JPEGs off of your camera (“straight out of camera” or SOOC) and pick the ones you like.
But on this recent trip to Japan and Taiwan, I found I was not that happy with any of the recipes I had selected, and I didn’t feel like finding and programming in new recipes. Coincidentally, I had recently watched a video by the photographer Sean Tucker on his own history editing digital photos which no doubt also inspired me to have another go at it.
Tucker discusses three phases of his editing: an over-editing phase where he really manipulated the images, followed by a phase where he feels he under-edited his photos because he was afraid of doing too much, and finally his current phase where he will punch up the photo to somewhere in between. He says he had to go through the first two phases to get to this point, it was only by pushing to the extremes that he was able to find a middle ground that he likes. Dare to suck.
This reminded of something I did in a workshop with the inimitable fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh in which he encouraged us to really push the boundaries of the noises we could make on our fiddles, to explore the limits. Press really hard on the bow to make the strings creak and scratch. How loudly can we play? How quietly? That kind of thing. Not because we would necessarily want to do that when we’re playing but, I think, so that we know where the line is and we can walk right up to it, or so that we might discover something interesting that we could incorporate in our playing. Dare to suck.
I am also reminded, as you may be, of that quote from Ira Glass about how we all have to fight our way through a period of being bad at something to get good at it. That the challenge for many of us is that we have the taste to judge our work, but we lack the skills to live up to our taste, and that is discouraging. And in order to develop our skills, we have to persevere through our frustration. Dare to suck.
I often wonder if this is part of why it seems easier to learn to do something as a child. Perhaps as a child your taste is as undeveloped as your skill, so you don’t judge your singing, or painting, or playing as harshly, allowing you to develop the skills without becoming discouraged. Although, remembering my own childhood, and watching my own child now, I see plenty of times children get discouraged because they can’t do something, so perhaps this is not the case.
And so, here I am, tolerating this frustration as I muddle my way through editing the myriad photos I’m taking this trip. Sometimes, I’m encouraged by the result; sometimes it strikes me as middling and uninspired. You never see the ones I dislike.
What I aspire to is the skill to apply creative edits; to manipulate the color and contrast to create something more than pleasingly documentary, to create something artistic. One reason I loved (and still love) black and white photography is that it creates an image of the world that is unlike how we see it. I’d like now to be able to do something similar in color. It’s just going to take some time.
Dare to suck.