Hwo to Cure Perfectionism

Here are a few suggestions for curing photo-related perfectionism.

First, a few words about the words. The other day in the "Level With Me" post, I wrote, "...a fair number of photographers are meticulous or fastidious (the more pejorative words might be fussy or picky)...."

It's tough terminology all right; a lot of the available words have negative connotations. And if not connotations, associations. To be technical-sounding—and also neutral—it's become common to refer to the characteristic as "OCD" or "obsessive" or "compulsive" or those latter two words linked together. I confess I've been guilty of this me own self.

Well, wrong, wrong, and wrong. The word is perfectionism—and "control issues" and perfectionsim are not OCD. I finally got around to reading up on OCD recently—at a reader's recommendation I read Judith L. Rapoport's The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. OCD is a serious (but curable, or at least manageable) mental disorder that manifests itself as extreme, insistent personal superstitions that the sufferer tries to cope with by means of private and personal ritual behaviors, usually concealed from others, the most common of which, in the early stages, are repeated washing (as of the hands) or repeated checking (to see if a door is locked or a stove is off, for example), but which can proliferate in all sorts of wild ways and can be extremely bizarre. It is a distinctive malady and is not in any way the same as being fastidious about level horizons or enjoying careful craftsmanship.

As an aside to my aside, In some outlier cases perfectionists deserve pejorative terms! I once helped a friend to sell a particularly superb example of a Leica M4—he had searched high and wide for it, and it was a survivor, without blemish or defect. We located a German collector who paid top dollar—er, deutsche mark—for it, and we shipped it off to Germany. A month or two later it was returned along with anxious importunings for a refund. Obviously with the use of a magnifying glass, the collector had identified a "pinhole" defect in the chrome plating of the top plate, which a.) was not visible to the naked eye at a normal eye-to-hand viewing distance, and b.) the collector admitted was very likely a factory defect—meaning, Leica made the camera that way and the pinhole was there when the camera was brand new.

Now that dude—er, der Kerl—had a problem! But it was a problem with perfectionism. Not necessarily OCD.

Anyway (a former editor of mine once said, "you do go on, don't you?"), maybe I'll try to find a different technical term.

I like persnickety.

Slider anxiety
Level horizons and rectilinear lines are hardly the only persnicketyness related to pictures. One I've written about before is "slider anxiety"—defined as the fear that you haven't pushed that slider hard enough, and that maybe a little more might help. Could that picture use just a little more sharpness/saturation/max black/vibrance/whatever? You're worried that people might think your picture isn't quite enough of something, and your anxiety and insecurity allows you gradually to creep over the edge of right reason into excess. Or, you find yourself fretting about whether your lens is sharp enough in all ways and in every situation. Maybe you replace a perfectly nice older Canon 50mm Macro with a Sigma 50mm ART and then replace the 50mm ART with a Zeiss Otus 55mm and then find yourself worrying that maybe, just maybe, the Leica SL 50mm is just a tiny bit better than your Otus.

Whatever it is, here are two ways to deal with persistent persnickety thoughts:

• Go the other way. Do the opposite. If you fret and fuss over whether your pictures are saturated enough, force yourself to shoot heavily unsaturated pictures for three weeks. If you worry over whether you have a big enough sensor in your camera, buy a 1" sensor camera and see what you can do with it. Put the Otus away and shoot with a Lensbaby for a while. Whatever it is that you find yourself anxious about, take the bull by the horns, confront the demon, and banish the angst!

Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.

And if you're persnickety about level horizons, be glad you're not my student. You know what your next exercise would be.  :-)

• Find a different outlet for the impulse. I learned this when I forced myself to photograph with a view camera (a beautiful Wista) for a Summer, for the experience. What I found was that my 35mm shooting suddenly got much more free and loose. I realized that I had been composing very carefully and deliberately with the 35mm camera—which I had not even been aware of before. When the view camera came into my life—a camera much more suited to careful and deliberate compositions—it relieved my 35mm shooting of satisfying those impulses.

If you recognize some photographic impulse that you know you're being persnickety about, find a way to embrace and indulge it outside of your main picturetaking or -making activities. It could very well help.

(Of course it's possible that your photography is already the outlet for some less-than-healthy impulse, as a way of diverting it from some other area of your life. In which case, carry on.)

The not always silent sufferers
I lived underneath a woman who had OCD once when Xander was a baby. I never met this unfortunate sufferer, but I gradually learned some of her habits. The first was that she had to sweep and mop all the floors in her apartment every evening, including moving all the furniture away from the walls. (The rumbling and scraping of furniture being moved every night at the same time mystified me for a good long while.) Another was that every morning she left for work with her briefcase in one hand and a large shopping bag full of clothes in the other. A neighbor who did know her told me that she dropped off the clothes at the laundromat every morning and picked them up on her way home. And this is what tortured me—although the clothes came back from the laundromat folded, every morning she re-folded each item of clothing on an ironing board in her kitchen and marched it individually into her bedroom to put it away in the drawer. Her bedroom that was directly above mine, that would be. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Every morning. Back and forth and back and forth. Starting at 4:45. And me with a baby to take care of, short on sleep anyway.

Funny, with apartments hard to get in the near suburbs of Chicago at that time, the one I got happened to be sitting vacant. Coincidence? Unfortunately not.

Well, I do go on. That's enough about this—this should have been a short post. Butters is getting very antsy to go out and chase down his tennis ball...

...Which—oh, all right—he is obsessed with.  :-)

Mike

P.S. That old Canon Macro is one heck of a sharp lens.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

This post needs an illustration, but I'll try not to
obsess about it.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Larry Gebhardt: "Was the spelling in the title intentional?"

Mike replies: I experimented with different misspellings. I originally put the mistake in the word “perfectionism,” but then I thought that people might be searching for that word so I’d better not screw that up. No one would search for the post with the word “how.”

Had to get it just right.  ;-) .

Roy Feldman: "See last sentence: 'Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive-the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.' —Susan Sontag."

Mike replies: I've always thought that the best photograph is one that looks like it just fell out of the camera, no matter how hard you worked to get it. The best art looks artless, in my view.

SteveW: "This column has struck a chord with me. I avoid editing photos like the plague. I shoot JPEGs in-camera, and that is that. Once in a blue moon I will crop, but only to send out for a print. This column provided a kind of revelation for me, in that my avoidance of the sliders is to avoid anxiety brought on by indecision and uncertainty. I don't like to go there. Perhaps the best medicine would be to rock and roll with the sliders and just let it rip. Thanks Mike. P.S. I also obsess a bit regarding lens quality, but I thought that was normal, haha."

Mike replies: It's certainly common, but I don't know how normal we are.  :-)

Hans Muus: "Beautiful piece. And so recognizable. The (very) late hours in the darkroom spoiled with endlessly reprinting the same image with very small changes—changes so incremental I couldn't tell the prints apart in daylight the next morning. And then there is 'backwards perfectionism,' the urge to re-do all your earlier work in the style/technique you practice now, thus not only exerting your present energy in the wrong direction, but also denying your former self."

mike plews: "Twenty two years ago I witnessed a murder. After the initial shock wore off I was left with a pretty solid case of depression. I was sad, anxious and felt like my body was encased in cement. Just getting out of bed was a colossal challenge. And there were nightmares right out of Hieronymous Bosch. I recognized my condition for what it was and decided that if it did not pass in a reasonable period I was going to seek help. In a month I was OK but it left me with a deep respect for people dealing with chronic depression. Since that time I have never said depressed when I really meant sad or frustrated. Same for OCD. This stuff can hurt just like a broken bone."

Mike replies: Yes. Depression is an extremely serious disease; it kills a lot of people. There's a very good 52-and-a-half minute summary lecture about depression by Stanford's Robert Sapolsky on YouTube. I like the way he balances the physiological and psychological components. It takes a certain genius for reductionism to create such a comprehensive overview, and he does an excellent job. (I was originally tipped to the video by a TOP reader.)

Andy Johnson: "Re 'I lived underneath a woman'—that must have been very uncomfortable...I prefer to be on T.O.P."

Nick Hunt: "Mike—firstly, I have to correct you. It's 'pernickety'—no 's.' (Well darn me—autocorrect has just told be it has got an 's.' Wretched thing must be set to US English.) Secondly, my slider anxiety is different. I am fearful of moving the slider too far. What if I go over the top? What if my photos are thought of as (oh, horror!) gauche? Your 'aversion therapy' approach—apologies for another misappropriated and abused medical term—won't work. If I use less colour or less contrast or whatever for a week, then at the end of it I'll be...perfectly happy. Less is more. I love working in monochrome. Maybe I need to go super-saturated? But then there's the gauche thing, remember? Oooooph...."

Mike replies: Your aversion therapy would indeed be to make over-the-top, boldly gauche, crass photos for a week. But remember you only need aversion therapy if you are trying to cure yourself of a behavior that troubles or impedes you. If it doesn't bother you, then it's just the way you are. No cure needed.

Mus: "____________LEVEL HORIZON____________"

Bruce Gerencser: "I am a perfectionist. The why I am would take too long to explain. The short answer is that I spent most my life in Fundamentalist Christianity, both as a member and a pastor, and certain beliefs I held drove me towards perfectionism. This perfectionist tendency, of course, has filtered down into my photography work. There is no such thing as a perfect picture, and that poses a real problem for perfectionists. 😀 When I am editing photos, I have my definitely-not-a-perfectionist wife help with deciding which photographs I keep and which I delete. I've found she tempers my perfectionist tendencies.

"Forty plus years of walking the perfectionist trail has resulted in what my counselor calls Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD). OCPD has OCD simularities, but is not OCD. Here's a link you might find interesting."

Alberto: "Reading your articles is always a great inspiration for me and I'm so amazed from your ability to find so many interesting arguments, not only strictly related to photography. I find your 'Hwo to' article very funny to read and inspiring. I will follwo your example and I will let my photography to be more forgiving to small deffects."

alex-virt: "Another great article I can relate to! I am obsessed with sharpness and compulsively view my each picture at 100% and check sharpness in every corner. To cure this, I bought Nokia Lumia 1020, a 40MP phone whose lens is woefully unsharp in the corners. Have been shooting with it for about a month almost exclusively. I am thinking of doing a 'One Camera, One Lens, One Year' exercise with this phone.  :-)  "

Richard Skoonberg: "I like this point you made: 'Remember those Islamic mosiac-makers in the Middle Ages who would deliberately place one tile out of place because perfection was reserved for Allah.' It reminds me of beautiful Afghani carpets. When you compare these beautiful, handmade carpets to similar versions manufactured by machine in Europe, the difference is found in the imperfections created by handwork and manual looms: the borders aren't square, patterns don't repeat properly and there are flaws caused by the loom. The European versions are perfect and square. But it is the imperfections that delight the eye and reflect our humanity back to us."

Mike replies: I like your last sentence very much...well said.

Bob Rosinsky: "I have OCD. As did my mother and maternal grandfather. Unfortunately, my grandfather, a pharmacist, self-medicated. My mother spent half of her waking hours ritualizing, and I suffered from age seven up to age 35. I did not ritualize so much as suffer from intrusive thoughts (obsessions). Imagine a radio blaring horrendous words, awful sentences, and toxic content nonstop. Tourette Syndrome often accompanies OCD. I've had long bouts of Tourette; not fun.

"For me, the onset of OCD started around age seven. My first severe bout started in the fourth grade and persisted, nonstop, for a year. Eventually it receded. OCD is an anxiety disorder, so for many, it ebbs and flows.

"My intrusive thoughts were terrifying. Not until age 35, when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, did I seek psychiatric care.

"My first visit with the psychiatrist changed my life. Within five minutes he diagnosed my condition as OCD. Furthermore, he told me about a class of drugs (SSRIs) that are effective in the treatment of OCD as well as certain other anxiety disorders.

"I was relieved to learn that there were other people who suffered from OCD and that I was not a freak, not alone. On the other hand, I was ambivalent about taking a psychotropic drug.

"After a lot of soul searching, revealing my 'secret' in gory detail to my wife, and two or three more sessions with the psychiatrist, I consented to begin drug therapy. It took a year or two, along with weekly sessions with a licensed mental health counselor, to find the correct drug and dosage and acquire coping skills.

"My quality of life skyrocketed. By my 37th birthday, my mind had quieted down and the Tourette Syndrome receded.

"I am 58 years old. I continue to visit a psychiatrist every other month. I have a weekly session with a CBT therapist.

"In graduate school, I became interested in neuroscience and sensation and perception. I am especially excited about the rapid pace of progress in brain science.

"I have always been a fastidious photographer. Many photographers, designers, engineers, chefs, craftspeople, tradesmen, and others are fastidious, and they are often held back over smallish details at the expense of losing sight of the big picture. I believe perfectionism is stifling. However, I think there are distinctions between perfectionism and paying attention to details. Perhaps perfectionism and an eye for detail fall along a spectrum. I can only speculate.

"I've read that OCD will be excluded from the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is being reclassified as a neurological disorder rather than a psychiatric illness. Hmm."

Comments

[emptyspaces]

What you're talking about here is really a good way to go through your whole life.

[Dave in NM]

There's a a typo in your title, Mike.

[Michael McKee]

I laughed out loud at your title. Good job!

I'm not sure about persnickety. Could be. It is a good word, much better than the fussy word fussy. It does hold a note of snobbery though. Are you a snob?

Then there's the etymology of the word. According to Merriam-Webster:
Persnickety people like things neat and tidy, but the etymology of persnickety doesn't provide the kind of clean, clear explanation that appeals to the fastidious. "Persnickety" was first documented in English in 1892 as an alteration of "pernickety," a word that has the same meaning. "Pernickety" goes back to the early 1800s, but from there, the word's "history" gets messy. Some say "pernickety" might be from a child's version of "particular"; others, that the "nick" part came from association with "knick-knack." Or perhaps the Latin prefix per-, meaning "thoroughly, played a role. But it's all pure conjecture-no one knows for sure.

Isn't that a conundrum for pernickety personality?

Personally, I'm OCD about level horizons. I even go around and straighten other people's paintings and photos when I visit. Their walls thank me, though my wife never did.

[Kusandha]

Hah! I didn't even notice the typo in the heading the first time I saw it!

And actually, is an intentional misspelling a typo?

[Steve Renwick]

If anyone accuses you of being too persnickety, remember the wise words of the great Peter Egan: "If people want to be dead wrong, that's their business."

[Joseph Brunjes]

Just shoot wet plate for a while.

[David Miller]

With a personality prone to persistent persnicketiness I have developed a 3-step program that works for me:

1) Be it a photograph or a piece of writing, PUT IT IN A DRAWER. Look at it after a week, a month, or —ideally— a year. My first fresh glance tells me if there's anything glaring that needs to be fixed … or tossed.

2) USE A CAMERA WITH AN OPTICAL VIEWFINDER. I can't see the persnickety details until I open the image on my computer or view the film through a loupe. I'm currently using a Fuji X-pro for landscape photographs — when I use the electronic viewfinder and a tripod I get better technical results and have a higher proportion of "keepers"; when I use the optical viewfinder I get more surprises and have more fun.

3) GROW OLDER. As time and acuity of vision become increasingly limited, it is easier to weigh the importance of finicky details.

[Kelvin Jones]

"Hwo to Cure Perfectionism"Well I guess you'll let Allah correct the typo!
You'll have to deal with all the comments you'll get on this one ;^>

[marcin wuu]

"Hwo", eh? I see what you did there...

[Eamon Hickey]

On the other hand ... I recently came to wish I had a little bit more perfectionism in me. Two years ago I bought a moderate wide angle lens for about $300 — refurbished with a warranty. I intended to use it as a knockaround street/travel lens, and so, embracing un-perfectionism, I gave it only a cursory test. It seemed okay, and okay was all I aspired to. The first few times I used it, I did get a couple of weirdly unsharp results, but, reveling in my loosey-goosey air, I dismissed these shots as no big deal to a sensible guy like me.

I didn't use the lens all that often, so time passed without any cause for alarm, and the warranty expired. Recent bad results in pictures that mattered to me caused me to look more closely at the lens, and sure enough, it's significantly defective when used in a specific way that I use it about 30% of the time.

Now for the kicker: the manufacturer, who I won't name, does not provide any spare parts for the lens. It can't be repaired. (The first time I've encountered this in a new, still-on-the-market lens in 35 years of photography.) It's out of warranty, so I have no legal right to a replacement. I'm out $300, which I am hereby writing off to the bitter wages of un-perfectionism.

[Michael]

Thanks a lot for that post, Mike. I do find myself overtaken by one worry, then another, then another. Lately that post mentioning that absolutely all of the, ah, flower or whatever is in focus before I glory in the bokeh had me worried: are any of those macro shots OK, or should I dump them? Well I got over that, and now I'm worrying about sharpness ... again. But on the other hand (I say to myself) I make most prints on A4 paper, so what's to worry? And since the main critic in my tiny circle of viewers is a painter, I really don't need to worry: when was her stuff ever in focus, huh?

[Speed]

A short deadline can be a cure for extreme perfectionism. Can perfectionism be extreme? Or is it extreme by definition? Is that redundant? Let me look it up. I'll check and get right back to you. Hold on, I think I found it. No, let me look at another source. I don't like that one. Just a second, I'll Google it. Darn, Google is supposed to be so smart but it's wrong. Maybe Bing ...

And on into the night.

[Steve Snyder]

Hwo... yes indead!

[Grant]

I don't wish to appear picky or fussy, so I will gently suggest that your spell checker is under the weather. I'm not sure hwo you can fix it.

[Brian Taylor]

If the photographic offerings on sale in touristy cafes here in the U.K. are anything to go by, we're in the middle of a slider anxiety pandemic. I'm not sure whether this isn't simply conformity to aesthetic fashion rather than a sub-species of perfectionism though?

I have mild symptoms myself, but can at least point to the mitigating circumstance of selective colour blindness. This can induce a gnawing sense of the impossibility of knowing whether I've committed an elementary howler that will be glaringly obvious to everyone else. Aaagh! The solution? Enlist a colour consultant, ask other people what they think of your photos, and/or Stick with Fuji's widely acclaimed JPEG's :) -but that's another story .

[Thomas Rink]

I hope that this doesn't count as OCD on my side - but Alter is not a fitting translation of that dude. What you wrote is more like a salutation - hey, dude would be ey, Alter in (colloquial) German. Suitable to greet an old friend, or to address someone you don't know but whose driving style you don't appreciate, you name it. Addressing police officers this way is discouraged, though.

In your context, (that dude), I'd rather use der Kerl (attention: mildly pejorative).

[Fixed, and thanks. --Mike]

Best, Thomas

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I use the opposite approach to "slider anxiety" -- I say "You never know if you've gone far enough until you've gone too far." So I'm not left wondering; I know that further out is definitely too much.

(This doesn't of course protect me from choosing personal preferences that other people will think are "too far". But I can't see how anything really protects me from that.)

[Michael Perini]

Mike,
Good and helpful advice.
Anyone who does creative photography seriously wrestles with the
"when to stop tweaking' demon. There is always more (or less) we can do. It was true in the darkroom, and is more true with digital (because there are more tools and it is easier)
I think Printing helps because it forces the issue. When you sign a print, there is a finality, it says this is the best I have to offer at this time and date.
It helps me to think about Steve Jobs' remark that "Real Artists Ship"
Learning to let go and move on is as important to growth as vision and technical skill.
David Vestal & Stephen Pressfield (The War of ART) both admonish "Do the Work"

Having learned the trade a a commercial Photographer where one is forced over and over to Deliver and move on was in retrospect good training.
To this day, each time I shoot seriously, I push myself to deliver (to myself) at least one finished print. I can't say I'm always successful, but the discipline has resulted in a body of work of which I am proud. I find it satisfying to have evidence of productivity.
And knowing that I have to produce something also sharpens the intent when I'm out shooting.
Does it always work? Of course not, but over time, it works better than you might expect.

[scott kirkpatrick]

I think you've simplified things a bit. OCD has an interior part -- nagging concerns about contamination and the like, and an exterior part which is the ritualistic, compulsive response to deal with the interior concerns. The O part, nagging concerns is familiar to your perfectionist photographer, but perhaps not as severe or quite as distracting. And medicine can help both sufferers.

[RubyT]

Persnickety is the perfect word. ;)

[Jim Meeks]

There's a saying "Perfection is the enemy of good".

[Omer]

Don't know why, but when I decided it was time to try digital cameras an attendant compulsion took hold, the need to be very careful of composition. Well, wanting to get perfect compositions while doing street photography was a lesson in frustration that kinda shook off that dust from my brain. Out-of-focus pictures have a kind of charm to them, no?

[David Babsky]

“This post needs an illustration..”

(..I’ll not rise to the bait of your typo..)

Here’s an illustration: when Mr Maitani was obsessing - sorry; exercising his perfectionism - while designing the Olympus OM-1 and then OM-2, he was utterly emphatic that it must not be any larger than a Leica ..the Leica he had as a boy.

“I had started out using a Leica, and my enthusiasm for photography was such that I had even had pictures published in magazines. So I told the sales people that I didn't see any gap that needed to be filled, and that there was no need for me to make the [SLR] camera. They replied that the new camera could be just the same as those made by other manufacturers, but I thought exactly the opposite. I wanted to make something that didn't exist . . . Pentax SLRs were big and heavy, substantially bigger and heavier than the Leica . . .Ultimately, I realized that the real reason why I couldn't get enthusiastic about conventional SLRs was the problem of their weight and size. This is a major difference of 35mm cameras compared with the Leica.”

( Here on Olympus’ site: https://www.olympus-global.com/brand/museum/lecture/vol2/ )

The current Olympus engineers went, er, obsessively even smaller, with the remake of Mr Maitani’s PEN-F.

http://www.edituk.com/Photos_files/TOP.jpg”>

There, for me anyway, is an illustration of - appropriate - perfectionism.

[Richard Jones]

I assume your misspelling of "How" is one example of how to cure perfectionism (in spelling, anyway).

"You're worried that people might think your picture isn't quite enough of something, and your anxiety and insecurity allows you gradually to creep over the edge of right reason into excess."

I feel fortunate to have had a friend/teacher in my early years of photography who stressed that the final image is our own idea of how we want the scene to look like, rather than what other people think it should be.

"Or, you find yourself fretting about whether your lens is sharp enough in all ways and in every situation."

It's amusing to me to read on the forums the fascination with sharpness. I'm happy not to worry about all of that!

Richard

[adamct]

"Hwo"...I see what you did there!

;-)
Adam

[Richard Man]

"Hwo to..." We see what you did there, Mike. Well played.

[MikeR]

I know well what OCD can do. From the outside, one would think the person is possessed by demons. And, there's really nothing you can do to help, no matter how much you want to.

Pickiness: I bought a little smartphone stand, one that can also attach to a tripod. Did some tests when I got it, using a wireless shutter release that I bought at the same time. Major improvement over handheld. Haven't used it since. That much fussiness for a "snapshot" camera annoys me more than I can explain.

[Stan B.]

Two things: I've noticed that frequently when looking at great work, I'm more than willing to disregard the tiny imperfections- because the images are so damn good, and those little trivialities are just that, next to the overall enjoyment and appreciation of the actual experience.

Frequently, they can be the very same imperfections that I obsess about in my own work to no end. Perhaps because of the little voice of over compensation that says, "Yeah, but you're work isn't that g-r-e-a-t. Is it?"

The other is how digital has made me appreciate the small imperfections of film all the more. Digital can literally take your breath away with its super realism; after repeated viewing, it can also leave one with an uneasy sense of detachment with its hard edged, detailed perfectionism.

[SF Murph]

...and a perfect title!

[c.d.embrey]

The peripatetic Eric Kim recently said: You need less bokeh — bokeh is the lazy way to make photos. http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2017/05/02/antiphotography/ Today too many people are too lazy to do it right. They are cavalier about photography, but persnickety about saving poorly made pics in PhotoShop.

Mike said: I confess I've been guilty of this me own self. Misuse of words is common—some of these misuses are even trendy. Today many people say haptic, when they actually mean tactile. Haptic (from the Greek haptesthai, meaning "to touch") entered English in the late 19th century as a medical synonym for "tactile." ...Although almost no one today divides humans into "haptic" and "visual" personalities, ... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/haptic

[John Camp]

While OCD is obviously a problem, I'm not sure that perfectionism is, especially in the arts (as long as the perfectionism and the OCD are separate issues.) A person close to me is both, but his OCD takes the form of demanding perfection before the work is done -- that is, when playing the piano, if he makes a error, his OCD forces him to start all over again, only (usually) to make the same error at the same place, because that's the part that he hasn't been able to practice.

But perfectionism by itself...do you think that Ansel Adams, who traveled photographed constantly, and was a darkroom perfectionist, really was happy with more than 2 or 3 photos *per year?* Give the length of his career, I don't think I've ever seen that many photos of his published. (That would be ~100-150 photos per roughly 50 years.) That's a lotta art, and there's hardly a really bad one in the bunch. If you want to be an artist, why not go for that?

[A. Dias]

You misspelled 'perfectionism' - second sentence, fourth paragraph. :)

[THAT'S just a typo. "Typos never rest." --Mike]

[KeithB]

While not necessarily OCD, the late Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" fame) has several books that go ever these kinds of cases such as "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat".

[Stephen Gilbert]

Hwo to cure .... :-)

[Dennis Dunkerson]

I assume that "Hwo" in the title is your way of trolling for OCD proof readers.

The story of the Leica M4 reminded me of my brief career as an employee at a NYC camera store. I was always amazed at how obsessive some people were about only buying equipment that had never been touched by another human being.

[Ernie Van Veen]

All that to get to 'persnickety'. I like your sense of humour. (I'm an Aussie, so I'm persnickety about using the English, rather than American, spelling of humour.)

[Bryan Geyer]

Living "underneath a woman" generally recalls more pleasant memories. At least for me, and given my age.

Bryan Geyer

[Anil]

Did you purposely type "Hwo" in the title as some sort of meta-reference to perfectionism?

[Dan Meyers]

I'm trying hard not to be a perfectionist, but I did notice you misspelled "How" in your title.

[Alberto]

Reading your articles is always a great inspiration for me and I'm so amazed from your ability to find so many interesting arguments, not only strictly related to photography.
I find your "Hwo to" article very funny to read and inspiring. I will follwo your example and I will let my photography to be more forgiving to small deffects.
Regards
Albert

[Jeff]

And then there are some obsessed with the notion of being underneath a woman.

[Perfectionist]

Hwo, How. I see what you did there... ;)

[Ed Wolpov]

Damn it, fix that typo in the headline, it's driving me crazy!

[Richard Parkin]

One man's typo is another man's Old Saxon:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hwo

[David Lee]

I don't mind tilted horizons in general, but there is one photograph, that I happen to love, that has a tilted sea horizon and it drives me just a little bit crazy. It's by Andre Kertess, taken from a balcony in a hotel, probably...

[Allan Graham]

Well, I'm certainly not a perfectionist. I just have a neurotic sense of precision.

[David Littlejohn]

Regarding slider anxiety: My photography professor (in the 1970s) always said "You don't know if you've gone far enough until you are sure you've gone too far."

[Terence Morrissey]

The nature of the beast.

[James]

We perfectionists never make mastikes.

[Fernando]

I love the "Hwo" in the title.