“Good isn’t good enough.” That was the mantra of the advertising school I graduated from twenty years ago this year: The Creative Circus. I took it to heart. While a student there I’d spend hour after hour lighting and relighting something in different ways, learning by doing so.  We would come to class with work we were truly proud of having created, only to have our instructors critique it pretty harshly, tell us how to make it better,  and send us off to reshoot it again by the time the class met again.

It wasn’t unusual for Circus students to pull all-nighters, because there was no way around doing so. We weren’t good enough to create much of what we were being asked to create with certainty and efficiency as we would be expected to do once working professionally in the real world. That was the whole point behind pushing us as they did.  I took that to the extreme, regularly staying awake for two days at a time straight, and one time, even for four days. Straight. I learned that I had pushed myself too far that time. I was doing this only with the aid of caffeine, lots of determination – and my youth. I was only in my mid-twenties at the time and obsessed with school and photography. I had energy and passion to spare.

Fast forward to 2017. Both of my parents both got very sick that year, and I lost much of my interest in photography during it all. I felt totally burnt out with it. I’d just gotten married and didn’t want photography to be my whole life anymore as it had been when I was single. I was tired of feeling as if all I knew to do in life, to earn a living, was take pretty photos for clients. I was in the depths of these feelings when I wrote a blog post titled Sea Change in the June of that year. If you care for a deeper explanation of those feelings, and what it can feel like to make a living as a freelance creative, check it out.

I didn’t say it at that post, but I knew at that point I was about to steer my life in a different direction by getting into healthcare. I wanted to get into the industry that had so frustrated me when my folks had gotten sick, to try and be something positive within it, rather than just complaining about it. I thought I was going to be a nurse, even though I have often felt like God put me on this planet to make images. It’s often said that if you wanna get a good laugh out of God just tell Him your plans for your life moving forward…

So, here I am writing this while in the depths of a great radiography program. A radiography program that I feel lucky to be part of. What am I doing? Learning to take more pretty-ish photos for a living – with radiation rather than visible light. I’ve got to see some really – really – cool stuff as a result. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

I’m in a class full of highly motivated academic overachievers, and, for the first time in my life, I often feel as if I really suck at making images. Radiography is insanely similar to photography in so many ways. On the physics side of things, we’ve been recently learning about some of the same concepts I was taught 20 years ago back at The Creative Circus, but we’re having to get disturbingly nerdy with it.

What I’ve been mentally wrestling with is that I’m now actively being taught to do the exact opposite of some of the things that make me a good portrait photographer:

Rather than reminding those I’m photographing to breathe while in front of my camera, I’m instead telling patients to hold their breath in front of the camera (or x-ray tube).

Rather than working to get those I’m photographing to loosen up in front of the camera so that will transfer into them looking more relaxed in the photo, I’m now having to tell patients to get into and hold still are some very uncomfortable positions. Sometimes even causing them to cry out in pain.

Rather than being able to work a little harder to pull the expression out of somebody I’m going for by shooting multiple shots to get them loosened up in front of the camera, only exposing them to the harmless pop of my strobes, I’m now having to try my best to get the needed image in just one shot without having to repeat it. You can’t just casually expose people multiple times when the light you’re using to create the image is radiation. When I miss a shot and have to repeat it, which all radiographers have to do occasionally, I feel a real sense of guilt.

Rather than being able to show somebody something in themselves they hadn’t seen before and realize they aren’t so bad in front of a camera after all, I’m now working to show something within the patient that truly can’t be seen with the naked eye, often revealing something that will be bad news for them. There’s nothing fun about doing a chest x-ray on a woman for something totally unrelated to breast cancer, and seeing in that x-ray, that she appears to have a cancerous mass in one of her breasts. I can’t tell the patients what I see in their images, nor can I tell others they were ever even a patient.

So, after having worked as a professional photographer, being a radiographer-in-training feels much like trying to be a professional photographer while wearing a straight jacket – with my mouth taped shut. It feels very unnatural to me. I sense that I will be good at it once I’ve overcome and become more comfortable with these differences. But that hasn’t happened yet, so I feel as if I’m struggling with it.

My class was recently given a copy of a radiography journal article titled “The Enemy of the Good.” It emphasized that radiographers should not let great be the enemy of good enough to be diagnostic. For us not to feel as if every x-ray we create needs to be textbook perfect, because they’re, by nature, just not going to be. I understand and agree with the points being made in the article, but, at the same time. Well. Consider how I started this post. “Good isn’t good enough.” That’s what I once had drilled into my head while in photography school, when now I’m being told the exact opposite, in an industry where I feel far more responsibility to get it right and to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As a result of all this radiographic rumination – or scatter –  that I’ve had bouncing around in my head, I’ve realized, in the past month or so, that my interest in photography has come back and come back strong. After having cared little about taking photos, and the craft of photography for the past six years or so, I’m finding myself wanting to shoot again. To go seek out people to photograph. I can only attribute this to my looking to balance the way radiography has been making me feel versus photography how being a portrait photographer makes me feel.

I feel as if I suck as a radiographer-in-training, yet I feel so confident as a photographer, and I’m, having to learn how to mentally deal with the extreme contrast between those two feelings. Everybody that’s great at something sucked at it at some point though for some period of time: Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, J.S. Bach, Eddie Van Halen, and countless seasoned radiographers out there who once were in the same place I’m in now.

I owe it to my patients, current and future, to continue to hang onto that “Good Isn’t Good Enough” mindset, while still learning to be okay and comfortable with “The Enemy Of The Good” mindset because I often will have no choice but for the good enough mentality to suffice as a radiographer.

Finding a comfortable balance between all of the above is the biggest challenge I currently face. I will overcome it, but the only way I know how to is through more and more experience. I’ve gotta just embrace the suck as I’m gaining that experience.

Writing all this has been an effort to clear my mind of all the thoughts I’ve mentioned above. And this portrait of me, which is a self-portrait, is from another project I’ve started regarding my creative photographic mind crashing together with the more analytic radiographic mind I’m having to develop. I’ve yet to share that project, but one day I will.