As Much As I Love This Photo, I Hate It.

Over Memorial Day weekend in 2025, the wife and I took a fun little trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park. We stayed in a small, old-school cabin motel called Foot of the Mountain Motel. Me, being a native Texan and relatively unfamiliar with things like “mountains” and “water” was absolutely enamoured with the setting in which this quaint little motel had perched itself. So much so, that I got my groggy butt up during blue hour so that I could get photo of the setting before the sun came up. And boy oh boy, was I in for a treat. The fog was thick, the air was crisp, and the ground was wet from a light mist. It was relatively quiet, the only sound being the low rumble of whitewater from the nearby creek. Where I come from, it’s a raging river, but there I guess it’s a creek.

I didn’t have the tripod with me, as we were traveling light, with only carry-on luggage. That meant whatever I shot had to be hand-held and quick enough of a shutter to keep everything relatively sharp. And I did a decent enough job, I’d say. And this was the result:

This is a combination of two different exposures. Whenever I have a dimly lit environment, such as this, with a brightly illuminated sign or light source, I usually will first expose for the environment, to make sure I get enough detail in the shadows. This will inevitably blow the hell out of whatever is lit, so I will then do another exposure for only the bright light source. In this case, it was the sign. Then I’ll go into some photo editing software and blend the two together so that I can get a good overall image. It’s a balancing act; If I dim it too much it looks weird, and if it’s too bright, then what’s the point? In any case, the above photo was the final product. And I love it.

But I also hate it. As much as I love this photo, as much as it stirs my nostalgia and evokes memories and emotions of that little vacation weekend with my wife, it’s not a very good image, and there’s one big reason for that: Balance.

You know Balance. When you hang photos on a wall, you don’t just hang one photo. You hang two. Or three, but evenly spaced. You don’t just have a red pillow on one side of the couch. You have a red and a blue, one on each end. And of course, you don’t have just a right Twix, you have a left Twix as well. It’s all about the balance. And this photo has zero balance.

The scene consists of seven light sources, and not a single one of them are in the right half of the photo. Literally all of the action is taking place in the left center of the frame. Now that doesn’t mean that a photo can’t have negative space, but that’s not what’s really going on here. Negative space would be like a blank wall, or a blue sky. Something minimal. That’s not what’s going on here. The right half of the photo is not negative space. It’s just… uninteresting.

I tried to balance it out with the park bench in the lower right corner of the image. It really is why the composition is set up the way it is. I wanted the bench to be a focal point as well, and balance the image out. But it was just too dark. The lack of a light source from both behind or beside the camera allows the shadow to almost completely swallow the bench. Ask yourself, did you even notice there was a bench in the scene, before I mentioned it? If you didn’t, I don’t blame you.

Had there been one more lamp behind the camera, to throw even the slightest glint of a highlight along the wet metal, and likewise the wire fence, it could have given that side of the composition just enough to lighten up that half and allow the scene to balance out.

And believe me, I tried to get it to lighten up. I tweaked the settings. I did some dodging and burning, but it all felt too artificial. The reason for that is that, again, there was no light source to play off of. If there were, I could have made it appear brighter than it originally was. But the fact that there is no light source there to begin with made all attempts to brighten up that side just come off as forced and obviously fake. Just the fact that I sit here, even as I am typing this, wondering if there isn’t something I can do to make it work is a testament to how poor the image is. It’s just not a good shot.

But I love it. And you know why? Because it evokes those good memories. I can smell the clean mountain air. I can feel the cold mist on my face. I can hear the river. And it’s a testament to how, at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be a great— or even good photo, for me to love it. All it has to be is genuine.