From the Desk of: On Messy Moments
The beauty of creative misfires, and the stories we never meant to tell.
Normally, I spend my time chasing the right frame. But lately, I’ve been thinking about what happens when things don’t go right, what I like to call the messy moments.
The shutter lags, and the subject blurs. A light leak spills across the frame like a flare. The roll of film jams halfway through the perfect shot. These aren’t the polished, client-ready deliverables. But they’re some of my favorite mistakes to make.
A few weeks ago, I had a roll of film developed, only to find that it had jammed halfway through. Two moments layered on top of each other in one frame. At first, I winced, frustrated I’d lost the clean shot. But the more I looked at it, the more I saw something else: a story I hadn’t meant to tell, but one that somehow still worked. Days later, another roll came back with a frame completely overexposed. Washed in light, barely legible, but beautiful in its own way.
These moments creep in all the time when you work in a creative field. Unexpected errors, timing off, tools that don’t cooperate. And while the instinct is to edit them out, I’ve learned to embrace them. Instead of discarding the imperfection, I ask: Is there something here worth keeping?
Sometimes, the moment you didn’t mean to capture is the one you keep coming back to.
We’re taught to perfect; to retouch, to refine. But there’s a pulse in the accidents, a kind of honesty that you can’t replicate on purpose. Some of my favorite creative choices have come from salvaging mistakes and turning them into part of the story.
There’s a certain kind of magic that lives in the misstep. The moment that slips through your fingers and lands somewhere unexpected. And if you’re willing to look at it closely, to hold it for a second longer before discarding it, it might just offer something better than what you were chasing.
Because the real work, the creative work, isn’t about controlling every outcome. It’s about learning to work with what shows up. Even when what shows up is a mess.
Sometimes, that’s where the story begins.