How I Improved My Photography in Five Simple Steps – Step One: Fail to get Pregnant

How I Improved My Photography in Five Simple Steps – Step One: Fail to get Pregnant

1577 886 James Tocchio

I went from being someone who knows almost nothing about photography to being someone who knows a little bit about photography by following these five simple steps. This isn’t a roadmap for everyone, but it is what worked for me. Your experience may differ from mine, and your results may vary.

Step One : Fail to Get Pregnant

Start off being unsure if you want to have children, but then meet someone who you really like, find out that they want to have children, talk about it, and then realize that you’d probably like to have children together. Try to do that. Then when a year has gone by and you’ve not had a kid, wonder why. Start worrying and try again.

After another six months, go to the doctor. Be told there’s a problem and that you might not be able to have children together. Contain your emotions and look for a way forward. You’re a practical person, and a hard worker, and you don’t like to give up. Look for a path forward, and assure your wife that it will work out, and inwardly worry about just how much she’s crying.

Step Two : Realize You Have No Control Over Anything

Spend lots of time at clinics. Listen to the doctor recite what seems like a well-learned Powerpoint presentation; step one, step two, step three of plan one, plan two, plan three, contingency plans explained years in advance. Feel buoyed by the activity. You’re moving forward and smart looking people are speaking in optimistic tones. 

Go to the pharmacy and accept the thin wax-paper bag full of syringes, go home, follow the instructions and inject your wife with drugs where and when the doctors tell you to. Be impressed when she doesn’t wince at being stabbed with syringes over and over again. Forget to tell her how impressed you are, because you’re an idiot.

Follow this procedure for months, and every month, fail to get pregnant and fail to stay optimistic. Wonder what you can do to fix things as the emotional distance between you and your wife widens. Tell her it’s fine when she apologizes for being so emotional. Tell her you’re proud of her for dealing with everything so well, which she is doing, all things considered.

Try to remember that there are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world with worse problems.

Don’t mention anything about any of this to anyone. Try to relax and be normal, and watch your wife try to be normal. Try to make her laugh, and try to do and say the right things at all times. Constantly feel like you’re doing and saying the wrong thing. Do as well as you can at your day job. Recognize that it’s a lot harder on your wife than it is on you, and that you can’t do anything about it.

Go to the doctor many more times. Begin plan two, which is more time intensive, more humiliating, and more exhausting. Spend thousands of dollars that you don’t really have, but know that you’d eagerly spend fifty times the amount if it would help. Know that it wouldn’t help.

Stand useless in a room at the clinic next to your wife and talk to her about nothing while a team of doctors and nurses do their work. Assume that what they’re doing to her hurts, but assume that she’s being tough as always, which she is, because she’s the toughest woman you’ve ever met. Get excited and nervous when, an hour later, she’s the closest she’s ever been to being pregnant. Leave the clinic feeling optimistic. Smile and spend the day with your wife. Remember how fun your relationship was before all of this, and know that it will be again if everything just works out.

After two weeks, learn that the procedure was a failure, and that the fertilized egg was lost. Listen to your wife tell you how frustrated and sad she is. Tell her you are as well, but always try to lessen the burden on her. Make a joke, give her a hug.

Have the next two fertilized egg implantations fail over the course of months. When your wife gets to the lowest emotional point you’ve ever seen, try to suggest that they were just tiny fertilized eggs, not actual people. Suggest to her she’s just making it harder on herself if she thinks of them as anything more than a handful of cells.

Know that you’re full of shit. Then worry that your wife doesn’t seem to cry as much anymore.

Step Three : Rediscover Your Camera

Sit in your office on a cold night in August while your wife is asleep in the other room, you think. You’re not sure if she’s sleeping yet. It’s become pretty normal to spend a lot of time in individual seclusion. Everything’s fine. She’s going about her business and holding it together. You’re going about your business and starting to lose it. Don’t tell her you’re starting to lose it.

For no reason that you can pinpoint, think of your old camera that you’ve not touched in years. Go into the basement and dig around for hours until you find the familiar bag. Unpack the camera and remember that you last used it when you and your wife went to Europe. Remember that you’d made hundreds of photos of her smile. Charge the battery and be amazed that it still powers the camera.

Do some light reading on photography to refresh the foggy memories of that one college course on photography you partially attended. Attach the prime lens that you bought over a decade ago, but never used, and then pack your rediscovered camera and your 50mm F/1.7 into a bag just before midnight on a cold Friday.

Send a text message to a couple of your friends because being alone with your thoughts is torture, and ask if they want to wake up in three hours, drive into the city, and make some photos during the blue hour (a thing you just read about on an Internet forum). When they reply in the negative, likely from the comfort of their beds, decide not to go. Then think better, and go anyway.

Step Four : Realize You Have Some Control Over Some Things

Wake up at 3 am. Drive into the sleeping city. Set up your tripod and your camera at the edge of the harbor, aim your lens at the horizon, and stand there in the dark and the cold. Listen to the ocean licking at the land. Listen to your breath, and watch it freeze and vanish in the air. Wonder how a city can be so quiet. Feel small in the quiet and wonder what you’re doing standing there, alone, before the sun has even risen, while your wife needs you at home. Remember that there’s nothing you can do for her.

As the sun begins to rise, turn the camera on, set the dial to A, you assume for automatic, and frame your shot. Buildings in the foreground, harbor at your feet, ocean diminishing off into the distance. Take a picture. Chimp on the LCD screen at the horrible photo you’ve just made and only vaguely recall why it’s so under-exposed.

Incompletely remember your photography professor from twelve years ago telling you about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Fail to remember most of it. Switch to manual mode and set the aperture to something small to increase sharpness, F/2 maybe. Then set your shutter speed. This is guesswork. You’re guessing, trying to find something that works. You choose 1/1000th of a second and take a second shot.

This one is slightly brighter than the previous shot, but still dark. Slow the shutter even more and take a third shot. This one is perfectly exposed. But the autofocus seems to be struggling, or creating camera shake maybe, or something, because the shot just isn’t sharp. You’re not sure why. You haven’t done this in a very long time.

Switch to manual focus and press your eye against the viewfinder. Focus on the horizon. Take a fourth shot. This one is still pretty fuzzy. Try to remember if small apertures create greater depth-of-field or if it’s, counterintuitively, the other way around. Set your aperture to a higher number to increase clarity, F/16 maybe. Take the fifth photo and review it on the LCD display.

Stand there and feel the outsized surge of frustration grip the base of your brain like an oily fist. Blink against your illogically watering eyes as you fail to understand why this is the worst shot you’ve taken so far. Sit on the edge of the sea wall and look down into the ocean. Notice a park bench thrown into the ocean, and think that the bench is not where the bench is supposed to be. Laugh at the absurdity of how mad you just were. Be proud that you were able to stay calm enough that the tears didn’t actually roll down your cheeks, then sit there for an hour looking at the sunrise.

Wonder how you could be so unhappy about not getting something you didn’t know you wanted. Laugh at the irony of your life. Laugh because you’re practical and stoic, and you’re not someone who cries because crying just doesn’t help anything, and you’re sitting there looking at the sunrise as if you were a character in a maudlin movie on the Hallmark Channel while people all over the world are suffering through much worse situations.

Wonder if your wife is awake yet. Wonder how that’s going to feel for her, to wake up with no one in the house. Wonder what the fuck you’re doing sitting alone at five in the morning with a camera you’ve not used in years trying to take a boring picture of a sunrise. Decide to pack it up and go home.

When you get back to the camera, look at the screen again. Think one more time about why the shot might have been so dark, and (sort of) remember that closing the aperture requires a reciprocal adjustment to shutter speed. Don’t recall which way to adjust the speed relative to the aperture adjustment. Take a guess. The shot got darker when you closed the aperture down, so let’s slow down that shutter to gather more light. Set it to ten seconds, the longest shutter speed you’ve ever seen, and take the shot.

The entire photo is in focus. The shot is properly exposed. You’re not sure how it happened, but all of the points of light are even flaring into magical sunbursts of multi-pronged light. The photo is good, and you feel good.

Decide to spend the next ten minutes taking photos of the sunrise. Adjust aperture and shutter speed independently, then as set values against one another. Learn through experience that you can make the sky darker if you choose by adjusting some dials. Importantly, you can make things brighter as well.

Take long exposures and walk slowly across the frame. Marvel at the LCD screen when you see yourself rendered as a ghostly blur traveling across the harbor.

Get distracted by flowers and take fifty photos of flowers with varying degrees of depth-of-field. Learn instantly how aperture impacts this, and the offset required in speed to make a proper exposure. Shoot a photo of a homeless man sleeping, realize it’s in bad taste, delete the shot, and lay a five dollar bill next to his pillow (which is a piece of cardboard).

Realize that for the last half hour you’ve not thought about all the things that you’ve struggled to not think about for the past two years, and think that photography might be something worth diving into again. Remember that your wife will be waking up soon and that you want to be there when she does.

Drive home, unpack, make two cups of coffee. Talk to your wife about the pictures and how quiet the city was. Show her the photos you made and talk about how much you miss the hobby photography. When she asks if you think you’ll keep making photos, say yes.

Chat casually about the next appointment at the clinic. Agree with her when she says that it will work this time. Be amazed at how resilient she is. Don’t let on that you had a weird morning, because she’s got enough going on.

Step Five : Have a Baby

One year later, and with an emotional depth which you were sure you’d never be capable of, appreciate the miracle that doctors had performed ten months earlier. More importantly and far more deeply, appreciate the miracle your wife has just performed, and watch in awe (and mild terror) as your daughter is born. Catch the eye of your wife, who’s still crying, but smiling too now.

Two years later, make another miracle baby. This time, with ease. Funny, how that works. Spend the rest of your life taking pictures of your family.

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James Tocchio

James Tocchio is a writer and photographer, and the founder of Casual Photophile. He’s spent years researching, collecting, and shooting classic and collectible cameras. In addition to his work here, he’s also the founder of the online camera shop Fstopcameras.com.

All stories by:James Tocchio
44 comments
  • What a lovely, lovely piece. So personal, yet everyone connects with it on some level.

  • What a great story, and incredibly how much I recognize. Our first daughter (now a beautiful young woman of 21) was conceived with the help of IVF; after many tries and many fails. And then our second daughter (18 now) just ‘happened’. A lot of emotion and stuff to go through. I have a lot of respect for you to put this in writing here!

  • This is an awesome story! ( Did someone accidentally post this early, because I know I read this exact piece last week, and then I ciuldnco find it until now)

  • Life is a mysterious miracle.

  • Wonderful story, would love to see the initial sunrise picture!

  • Moving. Most heartfelt piece I’ve read in a long time.

  • Holy, moly. That was the most emotive thing I have ever read. I am so happy for you to have succeeded, but sad for the heartache you suffered along the way. What lucky children you have, to be wanted so much. I started my blog for an opposing reason, watching someone slowly die and needing to focus on something else. I think this article will stay with me a while. Well done sir.

  • This is GREAT writing….

    Thank you for sharing

  • “Realize that for the last half hour you’ve not thought about all the things that you’ve struggled to not think about for the past two years, and think that photography might be something worth diving into again”–ain’t that the truth. I had always heard about the power of a hobby (for lack of a better term) to battle depression or depression-like states, yet it can be so hard to find one that does the trick. I’m so glad it does, for you, for me. And thank you for the beautiful story.

  • Just excellent! And congratulations 🙂

  • James, thank you so much for your honesty and reflection, and sharing the wonder of how you family grew.

    Photography is a good hobby, especially when you remember it is about waiting and looking for the light, and how it displays and reflects. So many times we can get caught up in the discussion of the gear, and miss, as you say just capturing light in the eyes of those we love, or a smile, or the beauty of a flower, or a sunrise.

    Thank you for the inspiration

    Ross

  • James, thank you so much for sharing the story. Congratulations on the babies!
    Thank you for being so true with the readers. Thank you for being so honest with your life and photography.

  • What a great article. Photography has pulled me out of a bit of a dark place also. So glad things have worked out for you James and that we have this great blog to discuss what’s important to us. Even if it isn’t purely photography related.

  • My wife and I were through very similar a few years back and you hit the nail on the head throughout. The hope, disappointment, wondering, worrying… the isolation. Like a great photo often does, your writing transported me and had me standing there with you on the harbor’s edge at sunrise in the cold. Glad it worked out for you and your family (as it eventually did for us). Glad it led to you creating Casual Photophile for the enjoyment of many like me, and for others who may stumble across it at a low spot and discover a hobby to uplift them too.

  • James,
    I read this article, ruminated on it for 24 hours and read it again.
    A couple thoughts:
    First, this has got to be the best piece of writing I’ve seen a quite a while. It is intensely vulnerable and engrossing. Second, congratulations on your growing family and lifelong photo assignment!
    My wife and I haven’t yet started down the path of childbirth, but I still strongly relate to this. I’m sure one of your other readers is currently going through something similar and I hope they will be encouraged by your story. It seems it’s the darkest times in which we feel most alone.

  • Dude this article didn’t give me what it says on the tin, but….beautiful piece all the same.

  • dancomanphotography February 8, 2019 at 7:19 am

    Love this James, thanks for writing it.

  • Amazing, so human…

  • All the Best to Your Family 🙂

  • Randy Lynn Keeler February 8, 2019 at 2:24 pm

    James
    I just read (or almost) I could not get by #2. I was crying uncontrollably.. This described my son and daughter-in-law almost to a ‘T’. I was not aware of the many issues. If you don’t mind I wish to re-print this and try to read it to them… and apologize. There must have been so many times that my son felt alone. I can only hope that he did not want to burden me with his highs and lows, as I suffer from PTSD from fire fighter service and can be a piece of junk at times. I wish he had though. My son and daughter-in-law now have 2 children (two year old twins)..now all I have to do is get a camera into his hands and convince him to put away the phone as a camera. My wife and I have 4 grandchildren and I am always the guy with a camera in hand. I am now experimenting with B&W and my Konica IIIA. Yes my photography is therapeutic, it works most times.
    James, did you ever think your words could be so powerful? Just goes to show…we all have ‘it’, we just have to find it.

  • All i can say is thanks, i am a photographer, a doctor and in a simular situation. Apart from everything else, your writing ability, even in the midst of probable instability, is very fresh and i hope something you will persue. Photography hmmmm 😉

  • My favourite site just got better.

  • Best thing I’ve read in years. Thank you.

  • James, this literally moved me to tears. Had to subtly dab my eyes on my commute home. Photography is a great release for me, and was through my grandfathers death, and you’ve certainly inspired me to write about that.

    Thank you.

  • Hi! Just wanted to say that this is amazing – I ended up using photography to cope with the end of a relationship that meant a lot to me and I’m familiar with its amazing meditative and healing powers! So glad that this one had a happy ending, and many happy photos to come.

  • James, thank you for writing and sharing this post, it’s very poignant and emotive. Photography – like any creative outlet – is an essential in life, like eating, breathing and sleeping, not just an occasional treat.

    I confess while I used to be a regular CP reader, I stopped maybe a year ago because I was just done with gear posts generally and trying to find more blogs about the cerebral and emotional sides of photography. I’ll certainly be reading more often again after this post.

    • PS/ Came here via Jim Grey’s Down The Road post which featured you yesterday.

    • Thanks Dan! I appreciate you stopping by and giving a read. We’ve gained some new writers last year and they’re more interested in writing on craft and process, so hopefully that will help us balance a bit. Thanks again!

      • Good to hear James. (And from one father (and soon to be again) to another, so much of your post resonated. I don’t think us guys are ever ready for children, however much we adore them and wouldn’t change them for the world once they arrive!)

  • James, I echo what everyone else has already said. Such a well written and emotive story and one I am glad had the best ending (or perhaps beginning). As a 2nd time (with a 21 year gap) father to be, for which we had nothing like the difficulties you had but which felt bad to us, this piece touched me. I should have heeded Peggy’s warning and not read this at my office desk, luckily no one was looking.

  • Shit, James, that’s not fair. I’m sitting in an airport lounge and crying. And I’m a guy. And people are staring.

    What an amazing piece of writing. Thank you for being so generous in sharing your life. And thank your wife even more.

    Just promise me one thing. Warn me before you do something like this again.

  • We lost a son at birth, then had a daughter the next year. We then struggled through losses over and over, and learned that our daughter being born and healthy was sort of miraculous. We’ve spent the last 5+ years trying to get a healthy sibling for her, and her little sister (also an IVF baby) is due in July. The past year has been one of the hardest in this whole ordeal, and taking up photography last summer has helped. I appreciate you writing this piece, both because your experience has been similar to mine and because it’s important that more people understand how common and painful pregnancy loss is. Thank you.

    • Congratulations on the good things that have happened, and sorry you’ve had to go through the challenging parts. You mentioned how common this sort of thing is, and that was one of the most shocking aspects of going through this. Before, I thought I knew no one who’d had these kinds of problems. Afterwards I learned that three of my closest friends had the same experiences and we all went through it at the same times without saying anything to each other. There should be more discussion about it. Maybe this article will help that in an infinitely small way.

  • Great, emotional article. It really reminds about how great it is to be a husband, father and photographer. Thanks a lot for sharing this story with us. That’s the reason I keep coming back to your site. Because you show that photography is more then only gear.

  • Wow. Of course, I was crying, the Mrs. was looking at me like I was nuts. She asked me why I was crying, I said “I’m reading casual photophile”. That left her a little perplexed. So I read her the article and she was rather emotional also. Now I’ll go listen to Luna, smashing pumpkins.

  • This is a really lovely article – thank you for writing it.

  • As someone who works in healthcare this was an emotional read. Thank you for sharing this. I won’t overstate my praise because that would not appropriately reflect the depth and sensitivity inherent in this. That final line was indeed a kicker. Stay safe James.

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James Tocchio

James Tocchio is a writer and photographer, and the founder of Casual Photophile. He’s spent years researching, collecting, and shooting classic and collectible cameras. In addition to his work here, he’s also the founder of the online camera shop Fstopcameras.com.

All stories by:James Tocchio