A perfectly executed image is often exactly that: executed.
I’ve spent twenty years earning a living inside the thing everyone is told to think outside of: the white box. Inside it, everything can be controlled. Accidents still happen but in the studio an accident usually just costs a frame. Once, it gave me something instead. A flash refused to fire and two frames came back drowned in red. By every technical standard they were mistakes. They were also the best pictures of the series.
The Greeks understood this: inspiration was a goddess who visited. But she only ever visited people she found working.
That still holds where everything seems promptable. The AI artists I’ve spoken to all tell the same story: it’s never one good prompt, job done. They spend hours adjusting, changing, fine-tuning - and eventually rely on the last thing you’d expect to find inside a machine: chance. So I can’t even bitch about AI here. I just prefer my box white and full of people, not smaller, darker, and lit by a screen.
On location, control doesn’t end - it changes jobs. It stops directing and starts preparing. There’s always a plan B in the van; the client never hears about it. On top of Trollstigen in Norway, shooting for Porsche, we found our location swallowed by fog. The postcard we’d planned was gone, and the sensible thing was to move. I kept shooting. The fog was the picture. In Iceland, a horse walked into frame, curious, and headed straight for the model. I got two frames before she noticed it and panicked - she was terrified of horses. Two frames. You cannot plan that. You can only be standing there, camera up, when it happens.
A really good shot can be compared - to the moodboard, to the reference, to the campaign before it. The exceptional one is singular: nothing to hold it against, nothing it derives from. You either feel it or you don’t. I can plan a really good shot. I can’t plan an exceptional one.
For most of my career my practice didn’t match this theory. I tried to control harder, when I should have been building the environment where chance could do something special. My mother had the correction all along: Gib dem Zufall eine Chance.
Give chance a chance.
