Opinion: The ‘Almost’ shot and the line we draw as photographers

I’ve found myself in a bit of a dilemma. Last year, I was lucky enough to visit the East Coast of Tasmania and photograph at Binalong Bay.

It’s a stunning location, but despite three early-morning attempts, the sky never quite cooperated. I took plenty of shots, but there was one image I really wanted – a shot captured with an ultra-wide angle lens looking towards Little Elephant Rock with a decent sunrise in the background.

I composed carefully, had the light hitting all the right places and yet…it just didn’t come together.

These days, fixing that is almost too easy. When I first started using Lightroom 15 years ago, it was a basic sorting tool with an editor tacked on. Now, local adjustments to specific parts of an image are simple, the interface is intuitive, and tutorials are everywhere.

Tasks that once took hours can now be done in seconds. I still remember my friend Mark Galer giving an entire presentation on denoising an image; in 2026, the same result can be achieved with a single click.

Take my nearly-there shot. I dropped in a bright red preset sky in Lightroom, and suddenly the image looked exactly like what I had hoped to capture.

Yet in doing so, it pushed the image into pretty uncomfortable territory.

Now, I can’t publish it or show it to friends and family in good conscience, and I can’t print it at home for my own use either as it would just bug me, sitting on the wall as a reminder that it’s not all my own work.

And before you suggest it, I can’t even swap in a sunrise from one of my own photos as a partial solution—every shot I took those three mornings looks pretty much the same.

Most likely, the image is going to remain stuck in a bit of a grey area on my hard drive, filed away as one of those ‘almost’ shots, waiting to be upgraded on a day when I get to return and shoot it again perhaps, or simply never looked at again. 

Everyone has a different line in the sand for editing, and mine has changed over time. But what hasn’t is the idea that much of the magic in photography comes from capturing every element in the frame yourself. I didn’t get it this time, but maybe I will next, or a better shot entirely.

Sure, it can be frustrating as hell, but I’m trying to treat this one as a building block. The elements are there, I now just need the other bits to come together and make the magic happen next time.

I suspect most photographers have a few images like this tucked away. Shots that are close enough to hurt, but not quite right.

I’d be interested to know what you do with yours. Do you leave them as they are? Do you push them over the line with modern tools and call them finished? Or do you file them away and treat them as a lesson for next time?

Let me know in the comments.