I Rejected a Photo Most People Would Probably Publish

There is a particular kind of psychological illness that affects photographers after enough years behind a camera.

At first, you are happy simply because you captured something.
A face. A gesture. A decent exposure. A dog crossing the street with good timing.

You feel alive. Photography feels infinite.

Then one day your brain quietly mutates into a small authoritarian regime.

Now you zoom to 200%.

You inspect eyelashes like a forensic investigator.

You reject photographs because the focus landed on the wrong knuckle.

Welcome to adulthood.

A few days ago I made a photograph in Mexico that I genuinely liked. A butcher looking directly at me, knife in hand, red tones everywhere, expression full of life. The kind of frame that immediately feels cinematic when it appears on the back screen.

For about twelve seconds, I thought:

"This one works."

Then I zoomed in.

Fatal mistake.

The focus had landed on the wrong hand.

Not disastrously wrong. The image still breathes. The energy is still there. In fact, many photographers would publish it without hesitation. Some viewers would probably even call it "raw" or "visceral."

Meanwhile, I stared at it like a disappointed football coach reviewing VAR footage.

Because photographers are strange creatures. We spend years trying to become free, instinctive, emotional, alive in the moment… only to later destroy ourselves over three centimeters of missed focus.

And the worst part?

I understand perfectly well that this obsession can become ridiculous.

One of my heroes is Nan Goldin. Her photographs often feel fragile, immediate, imperfect in the most human sense possible. They survive because of emotional truth, not optical perfection. And yes, a lot of them are out of focus, with the wrong focus spot. 

And yet there I was, rejecting a photograph because my autofocus decided the wrong plane was more important than the face.

Technically speaking, this is also where the choice of aperture becomes part of the story.

At f/4, the image would probably have survived. There would have been enough depth of field to keep both gesture and expression inside a usable sharp zone. At f/2.8, on the other hand, everything becomes a gamble. And sometimes the gamble simply fails.

That is the part nobody likes to admit. Not because f/2.8 is "bad," but because it demands absolute precision in a world that rarely gives you perfect alignment.

But photography is full of contradictions like this.

We romanticize imperfection until it appears in our own files.

Then suddenly we become executioners.

The truth is that focus only matters where focus actually matters. Not every image needs surgical precision. Not every photograph lives or dies by technical purity. Sometimes atmosphere is enough. Sometimes emotion carries the frame beyond its flaws.

But sometimes you know, deep down, that the photograph missed the exact thing you wanted it to become.

And that feeling is difficult to negotiate with.

People often assume experienced photographers become more confident over time. In reality, many of us become harsher editors. Not because we hate photography more, but because we understand more clearly the distance between a good frame and a lasting one.

That distance is often microscopic.

I still feel like a beginner almost every time I photograph. I still miss frames. I still hesitate. I still review images wondering whether I truly saw what I thought I saw. Some days I feel less like a professional photographer and more like a man endlessly arguing with autofocus systems and his own expectations.

Maybe that feeling never disappears.

Maybe it shouldn't.

Because the moment you stop being severe with your own work, you also risk stopping your evolution. The danger is not imperfection. The danger is becoming satisfied too early.

So no, I probably will not publish that photograph, but I am doing it here, because here I feel free to share the bad moments in my photography journey too. Because I am not here to say, "Look at me, I am the best photographer out there." 

I am a photographer and a writer who always argues for the great power of imperfection, and yet I can't recognize this photograph as something to show as a good photograph. 

This is me. But this can also be you. 

I think that in a world where everyone is going to show only the best things, we need to save ourselves with the normality of making errors.