An experience that immediately comes to mind relates to a failure in delivering quality work. I took on a photography project that was to be shot entirely in medium format film. It was spur of the moment and the turnaround needed to be done within a month, it was also my first time shooting an entirely film project with no digital images to accompany so it was unknown territory in terms of potential issues that could arise.
Ultimately there were multiple failing factors. One was the quality of development from the place I had processed the film through; there were multiple spots where they had put clamps directly through frames that were key shots, very disappointing. Another issue was agreeing to the timeline of a month. Since I was scanning the film myself and then editing, everything took exponentially longer than expected. So not only were key images completely ruined in the development process, I couldn’t follow through on the timeline.
From this I learned that I need to be more realistic when setting timelines, this wasn’t the only project I was working on so it wasn’t realistic to shoot, develop and edit/deliver everything within a month. Also, I should have reached out to people for advice on developers to seek out someplace that would have done a better job. I think because I was in such a rush it wasn’t a consideration I had in mind. Overall, I learned a lot from this experience and it drastically changed my perspective moving forward.