Original subtitles

Okay, so number five, embrace failure.

And this one is absolutely critical.

If you want to be present, if you

want to be lucky, and if you want

to stay in the moment, and you want

to perform to your potential, you have to

embrace failure.

Too many people think the path to success

goes around failure, but it actually goes straight

through failure every single time.

At least for us it does.

It's part of the creative process.

And that's a scary thing, very scary thing,

especially for wedding photographers, right?

We've got one chance, one day to capture

their day, and so we fear failure more

than anything else.

One of the biggest mistakes we can make

showing up on a wedding day is fearing

that we'll make one, because we are going

to make them.

We're going to make so many mistakes, just

like buying a lottery ticket, you know?

When I pick up my camera and I

put the camera to my eye, I've got

infinite possibilities for failure, and I've got a

few possibilities for success.

So it's not a matter of if I

fail, it's a matter of when I fail,

right?

So we fail often, we fail spectacularly, it's

all part of the creative process.

And the key here is not how often

you fail or how spectacularly you fail, it's

how quickly you're able to bounce back, right?

Because all of these images that I'm showing

you, all these failures were taken during the

first dance, and there's 80 more that I

haven't shown you to try and get this

one, right?

The persistence of working through that failure led

to this shot, led to the success of

this shot.

And here it is toned for maximum visual

impact.

All these failures were taken in order to

get this photo.

Persistence is the mother of good luck.

This was only possible, not because we weren't

afraid to fail, because we were afraid to

fail, but we did it anyways.

And we were stubborn enough not to give

up on something that we believed in.

Yeah, and if you think about it, everything

in the history of awesomeness was at one

point a long shot, right?

And embracing failure, it's easy to say, it's

not easy to do.

Believe me, at a wedding, when I miss

a shot, it's like the apocalypse is coming

down.

You don't want to be near anything.

And that stems from the pressure, right?

It's like we put all this pressure on

ourselves.

And you know, I'm nervous before every wedding.

Honestly, I'm more nervous before a wedding than

I was before any race that I ever

ran, or any fire that I ever fought.

And you know, it's like, I'm paranoid, I'm

not going to live up to expectations.

Usually my own entirely unrealistic expectations.

Yeah, I'm paranoid, I'm not going to live

up to his expectations.

Or yours, or the client's.

Yours are the worst.

But I mean, and that, but that pressure

that we feel is, it's inevitable.

You know, if you care, you're going to

feel that pressure.

And that pressure is required in any environment

where high performance is expected.

It's sort of, it's an inherent part of

our human journey of growth.

And whether you're a photographer, or a firefighter,

or an athlete, or a parent, one thing

that unites us all is pressure.

Erica's dad, the sports psychologist, was telling us

this story about a high school basketball coach.

One of his student athletes was really struggling

to cope with the pressure.

He had a scholarship.

I think he just lost his father the

previous year.

Coach, I'm under so much pressure.

And so the coach wanted to teach him

a lesson about pressure.

So they went down to the court to

shoot hoops one day.

They picked up a Spalding basketball.

And the coach bounced it over to the

kid and said, how's this?

Is this ball going to work?

So the kid bounced the ball and said,

yeah, coach, this ball's great.

So then the coach took the ball and

punctured it with a pen knife.

And then flopped it back over to the

kid and said, how about now?

Is this ball going to work?

Kid said, no, coach, it's not going to

work.

Well, how come?

Because there's no pressure.

Coach said, that's right.

No pressure, no bounce.

It's the pressure that gives us our bounce.

It's the pressure that gives us the energy

that we need to get the job done.

OK.

And I mean, I actually noticed that the

weddings where we had the highest amount of

pressure, whether it was the clients or just

the timeline or, you know, for whatever reason,

we felt extra sessions.

They tend to be the weddings where we

perform the best.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I hope we never

lose those butterflies that we feel before every

wedding, because we need those butterflies.

That's what's going to get us through.

It's like my track coach used to say

is we just got to we just got

to get those butterflies to fly in formation,

get that energy working for us.

A great example of that pressure at Ryan

and Tatiana Bernaiser's wedding, we felt a tremendous

I mean, we photograph a lot of photographers

wedding and weddings, and that's, you know, a

heightened sense of pressure.

But and with Ryan and Tatiana, that pressure

didn't come from them at all.

They were just you guys do your thing.

You know, if we get one shot that

we love, we're happy.

It might have come from the 90 photographers

on their guest list.

Exactly.

Although they weren't putting any pressure on us.

But it was that self perceived, right?

Like we've got all these world renowned photographers

here watching us, judging us.

But like Erica said, we noticed that for

whatever reason, we're able to perform when we're

able to use that that pressure, use that

energy to get the job done.

And we've realized that action cancels fear.

Okay.

And so we're learning to harness that nervous

energy into the job that we have to

do.

And realizing that failure is just part of

that job.

Yeah.

And really, as human beings, we have an

incredible capacity to normalize things.

So the true magic happens when it just

becomes normal, when it becomes part of the

process, part of the expected process, basically, to

fail.

And once we're not afraid of failing, it's

like we become unshackled.

And there's also so many times where those

failures, those so called failures have opened up

these doorways to creativity or opportunities that we

never knew even existed.

Yeah, it's like, how often have we, you

know, looked down at the screen, I was

like, oops.

Oh, that's kind of cool.

But that is still creativity.

Right?

Like, even though we refer to those, those

moments as accidental success.

They're quite often with us.

Most of our shots are accidental, actually.

It's luck, right?

But it's still creativity.

Creativity comes from mistakes.

There's another book on the reading list called

Scatterbrain.

And it shows how most of life's great

discoveries have come from mistakes.

So don't be scared of failing.

Embrace it as part of the process.

And try some stuff that might really suck.

And if it makes you feel better, tell

your couples that.

I do that all the time.

We'll be like, guys, do you mind if

we try spend five minutes to try something

that might really suck?

Yeah, for a portrait, for a portrait.

Yeah.

And they're usually like, yeah, sure.

Go for it.

Yeah.

Outside of portraits for the rest of the

day, we're trying stuff that might really suck

all day long.

And usually it does suck.

But failure is not fatal.

And once we become comfortable with that, the

world's the limit.

And finally, number six, shoot the shit out

of it.

And this seems to be a really hot

topic of discussions in some of the photography

forums out there.

I recommend you completely stay out of the

photography forums.

Or if you go in there, just go

in there for entertainment, which is what I

do.

I actually went in to one where I

found them discussing how many frames that we

shoot at a wedding.

And I pulled out some of my favorite

quotes.

So if you're photographing more than 15 images

on a wedding day, you're doing a disservice

to your clients.

Calling that amount of work takes way too

much time and slows down the delivery process.

My assistant and I shoot about 1,200

images on a 10-hour wedding.

Of course, I've been doing this for eight

years.

So I guess that makes a difference.

And then this one's my favorite.

A good photographer knows how to get the

shot in one capture.

If you need to take 20 or 30

frames to get the shot, you should change

professions.

Hopefully, it's none of you watching this that

wrote one of those quotes.

But it's very possible.

But according to this person, Lani and I

should have changed professions a long time ago

because we do shoot a lot.

We probably average 15,000 to 20,000

frames per wedding.

Between the two of us.

Between the two of us, yes.

And it's not like we're crime scene photographers

and we're just like click, click, click, click,

click.

We're shooting through moments and through actions, okay?

So we're shooting a lot, but not throughout

the entirety of the wedding day.

We're shooting a lot for short periods of

time because we don't have control over the

small, tiny little variations that turn an image

from a good image to a really good

image, right?

Like the placement of a hand, right?

So we're shooting a lot, but we're shooting

with deliberate purpose, okay?

Every frame we shoot, provided that we've made

it with intention and purpose, is like buying

another ticket in that lottery.

Getting lucky means taking those chances.

Give yourself the chance of capturing that split

second when every foreground, background, and mid-ground

element line up in a way that you

couldn't have even predicted or hoped for.

Give yourself the chance of telling multiple stories

in one frame.

Give yourself that chance of catching something completely

unpredictable.

We can't make this shit up.

We're not that creative.

Give yourself the chance of everyone's arms being

up in the air and everyone's feet being

off the ground at the exact moment your

flash fires.

Best luck, guys.

Best luck, plain and simple, right?

That the DJ decided to play jump around

while Lanny was out here composing this shot,

that's the lottery, right?

But that Lanny wasn't afraid to shoot 80

or 90 shots trying to get this one,

that's buying your ticket, right?

That's making your own luck, right?

If you've gone out there and done a

couple test shots, you've gone out there and

even done 30 shots, that would have been

hoping for luck.

But the fact that he stayed out there

the entire song, not afraid to shoot the

shit out of it, that's making your own

luck, okay?

But the most important reason to shoot a

lot, at least in my mind, the most

important reason is by focusing on shooting, shooting,

shooting, and improving, improving, improving.

Every frame is an improvement over the previous

frame.

It leaves no room for that voice in

our head to come in and pull us

out of the moment, right?

Because we're so focused on shooting.

Yeah, I find that whenever that voice creeps

in, it's never when I'm shooting, it's always

when I'm chimping or thinking or searching, it's

like when I'm actually making compositions.

And improving and problem solving and all that

stuff, yeah.

That's the most important reason to shoot a

lot, is it keeps that brain focused on

the task that you're trying to do.