Mistakes are part of life as a photographer or videographer. I’ve messed up too many times to count, forgetting to pack an extra battery, showing up to a shoot with a full memory card and botching my settings badly enough that the images were unusable.

Most of those just cost me lost photographs or some added stress. But sometimes a mistake leads somewhere better than the plan. While attending Sony’s Kando event, where Sony invited me along with fellow press and other image-makers, I asked six photographers and videographers about a mistake they’re glad they made. Here’s what they said.

These conversations happened on the fly at the event, so most of the creatives didn’t have the specific image handy. The photos below are from their portfolios, with the exception of Nancy Borowick and Jabin Botsford.

Sarina Soriano

Sarina Soriano (@sarinasoriano_)is a senior producer and director of photography (DP) for the San Francisco 49ers, where she’s a nine-time regional Emmy winner and was the first woman in the role, as well as one of the first Latina cinematographers in the NFL.

Her mistake was a setting she didn’t intend to be shooting at. “A mistake that I made that ended up actually turning out well was that I put a high shutter on one of my videos, but was able to really slow it down in DaVinci, and it looked absolutely epic,” she said.

Nate Luebbe

Nate Luebbe (@nateinthewild) is a landscape, wildlife and adventure photographer and a member of Sony’s Alpha Imaging Collective, with a portfolio built around grizzlies, northern lights and remote wilderness.

Luebbe’s mistake was accidentally using too slow a shutter speed for wildlife, which ended up being a visual tool that he likes utilizing. “Every now and then, a little bit of motion blur can tell a good story about an animal that’s moving fast,” he said.

He pointed to an image he took in Katmai National Park as an example of where the approach works: shooting the bears at the top of the falls in low light, he kept his shutter slow rather than pushing his ISO. “I ended up getting some motion on the water, but the bears were standing still. It looks kind of cool, and you can still see what’s going on. It added a little more depth to it.”

Nancy Borowick

Nancy Borowick

Nancy Borowick (@nancyborowick) is a documentary photographer, author and Sony Artisan of Imagery who has worked regularly with The New York Times since 2013 and whose work often centers on health and relationships.

Borowick’s mistake was a missing caption. Early in her career, she was photographing the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which she describes as “the most fun in the entire world,” she said. When prepping to send images to her editor, she realized one frame’s caption was incomplete. “I had asked the name of the dog, because we were at a dog show, but I never asked the name of the human, and I felt like that was important to have,” she said.

So she went looking online. “All the champion dogs have these Facebook pages, naturally,” she said, and the dog’s page led her to its owner, who, as it happened, was also named Nancy.

Two hours of messaging later, they were friends. That turned into permission to photograph the woman, her wife and their pack of golden retrievers at home, which has now become a long-term project called Part of the Pack, a series dedicated to photographing the relationship between dogs and those who breed, own and show them. “Caption information is so important, especially getting it right,” Borowick said, “but on occasion, mistakes lead to happy accidents and long-term projects.”

Jabin Botsford

Jabin Botsford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who spent 11 years on staff at The Washington Post covering politics, breaking news and, since 2014, Donald Trump.

Botsford’s mistake was a moment of missed focus. In 2020, he was in the Rose Garden for one of many Trump press conferences, this one running well past its expected length. “While the rest of my colleagues were just filing and hiding in the shade, I went around the side and shot all these photos with a 400mm,” he said. He noticed a fly circling the president and fired off a long burst. In one frame, his autofocus locked onto the fly rather than Trump, right when the insect flew in front of Trump’s open mouth. “It looked kind of like it was coming out of his mouth,” he said.

Dani Hamm

An example of Hamm’s high-key work, not the original frame that she mentioned.

Dani Hamm (@danigoinghamm) is an adventure, wildlife and nature photographer. Her portfolio is filled with stunning portraits of animals, from tiny birds to massive buffalo. 

When I asked about a mistake that turned out for the better, she instantly had an answer: “Overexposing an image and it ending up being a really cool high-key photo.” The blown-out background stripped away context and left just the animal, and she now creates high-key images on purpose.

Allison Anderson

Allison Anderson (@photoallison) is a travel and lifestyle photographer, videographer and Sony Alpha Ambassador who documents her solo trips all over the world.

Anderson’s mistake took a decade to pay off. Very early on in her photography path, she shot everything as JPEGs, mostly because she didn’t like how much space Raw files took up on cards and hard drives. Then she took a trip to Italy. “When I got home, I went to import all my photos, and I realized that somehow the camera had gotten set to shooting in Raw. And I was so annoyed because the file sizes were enormous,” she said.

She dumped them on a hard drive and forgot about them. “Ten years later, I went back, and I went through the hard drive again, and everything I’d shot at that time was mostly in JPEG except for this one trip that was all in Raw.” Because of that, she was able to edit the file, and one of those images is now printed large and hanging over her fireplace.

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We’re celebrating Save Your Photos Month in September with a new type of photo-taking mini-challenge. We’d love for you to participate to show off your photography.

Save Your Photos Month is all about treasuring life’s moments and experiences captured in your photography, whether they are mundane, magical or melancholic. Expect this mini-challenge to support this idea throughout the month as we reveal daily challenge updates.

Here’s how it will work

Every 48-hours this September, we’ll announce a new photo theme. Your challenge: shoot and upload a matching photo to our community album before the period ends. At the end of the month, we’ll feature our favorite photos in a front-page DPReview spotlight.

The photo album we create at the start of the mini-challenge will be the same one you use for submitting each period’s themed photo. As soon as we announce the update for the new period, submissions will no longer be possible. Think of it as an advent calendar of sorts, where we reveal the next period’s theme every 48-hours.

We will reveal the next theme at 8pm PDT / 3 am UTC, 48-hours after the prior one (see schedule below).

Steps to share your photos

• Stand by for the 48-hour’s announcement here on this post (see the schedule below).
• Take a photo that supports the theme. It must be taken during that period.
• Upload that photo to the shared album with at least a one-sentence caption. Feel free to write more if you have a story to tell.
• Feel free to announce your photo upload and discuss the mini-challenge below (but please only share the actual photo in the album).

Notice: If you are a new forum member, you need TWO normal posts before you can upload photos to the album.

That’s it!

To share your photos outside of the forums and on social media, be sure to use the hashtag #SaveYourPhotosMonth. DPReview has an Instagram channel you can mention as well (thank you).

Daily theme reveals

Watch here daily at 7 pm PDT / 3 am UTC to see the next 48-hour’s theme announced.

We’ve already revealed the opening theme, so you can prepare to upload once the album opens on that morning:

• September 1: What’s on your dinner plate
• 3: Something interesting on or around the outside of your home
• 5: When the light hits just right (indoor photo of an amazing lighting and shadow scene)
• To continue…

We’re excited to see your photos, so get ready for Tuesday’s mini-challenge kick-off. Have fun!