Filter

I took two years of photography classes in high school. Mr. Regalado spent an hour and twenty minutes every other day teaching us basic composition of photographs, photographic techniques, film developing and print making skills, and an introductory lesson on digital photography (on Photoshop version 4). In the earlier classes I would bring him test strips and ask him about my tones and in later classes I would ask him about picture composition. We studied the history of photography and he taught lessons on the great photographers and their photographs. Some captured theirs by hiking deep into Yosemite National Park and waiting for perfect lightings, others by landing on Normandy with the troops, (only 8 of 106 from the landing survived on account to a Life Magazine's lab tech that botched the film), and some by taking pictures of famous people as they are. I created a portfolio, entered contests, and learned about the basics of photographic elements.
One key to black and white photography is to make the blacks black and the whites white. On photoshop, we learned how to correct colors or mess with the layers to create art. Sometimes a picture is best if it is true to life or sometimes it is best if it is fixed. What was never taught in class was how to throw away something if it was not perfect.
Some of the pictures that I took or developed that were bad, but I liked them a lot and worked very hard to develop them. They turned out great for me. For one, I was trying to superimpose my head from one negative onto the head of a goat from another negative. I spent about two hours cutting card board, figuring out filters and exposure times, and waiting by the whirlpool in order to have a picture that never turned out "perfect."
I am afraid that too often I impose too strict of a filter on my photographs. I am not necessarily focusing on aesthetics; rather, I am more concerned about the process I go through to decide what is good and what isn't good. In photography I was taught how to frame objects within viewfinder to capture the decisive moment not how to crop unwanted realities within pictures. I cannot simply ignore objects within a frame because they clutter my picture or look ugly. (One obvious limitation with photography is the space outside of the frame.) Is a picture bad simply because I do not like it, it is too fuzzy, it is does not look like all the other pictures?
In closing, what made me think of all of this was when I looked at Noël's grandparents pictures a few weeks ago. With a big Portuguese smile she pulled out her wedding photo album. It included about 8 pictures of the day, two of which were fuzzy and the remaining were a bit faded. We had a few hundred pictures from our wedding, and I distinctly remember discarding from my mind hundreds because they were not that perfect picture. Has photography been so debased that all that remains are magazine covers and pottery barn advertisements? Must everything be perfect so as not to be discarded?
In what ways do I filter my life... I mean... pictures.