The Process Is The Plan

I spent some time working for a company that sold huge numbers of firearms via sites like Gunbroker and other online retailers. Part of this operation was taking photos of all the new guns that would come in so they could add them to each listing, and they had that process down to a science.

Long before I worked at this particular company, I had spent years assisting and working as an advertising photographer in a major metropolitan area. I had done some pretty amazing lighting setups (the amount of strobe lighting required to get good action photos of a professional basketball game would blow your mind), so every once in a while I would talk to the photographer at that store about the art and science of taking good gun photographs.

During one of those conversations, I mentioned how much I liked the work of some of the well-known names in the gun photography world, like those that you see every day on the pages of Shooting Illustrated and other NRA magazines..

“Oh,” the photographer for the gun store said, “I’ve seen that work. It’s not that hard to do.”

I am proud of the fact that I merely nodded my head and changed the subject, rather than blurt out “You freaking idiot! You use one lighting setup which you never change! You unbox a gun, place it on the set, take just one picture of it and then move on to the next gun! You have no idea what it’s like to spend three hours, much less three days, trying to perfect the lighting in order to make the very best shot possible.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that that photographer was perched way up on the high point of the Dunning-Kruger curve, what I like to call “Mount Stupid.” He had a glimpse of what being a working photographer was like and performed well in his limited area of expertise, but he assumed that everything else about commercial photography was as easy as what he was doing.

The Dunning Kruger Effect is a way to understand the gap between what we think we can do and what we actually can do. Most people will tell you they’re a good shot, but ask them to perform a relatively simple task, like a 5×5 Drill, and they will fail. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. As Dr. David Dunning himself describes it, “The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.”

Conversely, good shooters will downplay their abilities, as they have had a glimpse of what really outstanding performance looks like and know they are not up to such things. For example, I spent years shooting at one of the focal points for USPSA competition west of the Mississippi. I got to see top-level competitors like Rob Leatham, Angus Hobdell and Nils Johannson shoot, and I knew I was not up to that level. Now, am I a bad shot? No, not at all, I’m a USPSA C-Class competitor, knocking on the door of B-Class. Statistically speaking, this means I’m easily in the top one percent of gun owners in America. Does that translate into being one of the top one percent of competition shooters? Not even close. As such, if you ask me, I’ll tell you that I’m an okay shot, even though my on-demand performance is easily the best of my non-gun writer friends. 

Get Over The Hump

So how do you make the journey up and over the peak of Mt. Stupid? We dedicate ourselves to the process of improvement, and trust that this process will do what we want it to. Steve Tarani in particular has written extensively about this on this very website, so if you really want to find out just how good your marksmanship skills can be, that’d be where I’d start.

Secondly, commit to doing dry practice on a regular, consistent basis. To go back to the photography metaphor, almost all of us can take a great picture on a beach at sunset. We can pull off that one good shot, if the conditions are exactly right or if we get lucky. What makes a professional photographer a professional is that he or she can pull off a good shot no matter what the conditions are, time after time. Luck has little to do with it. Why? Because pro shooters (the photography kind, not the gun kind) spend hours tinkering in the studio or go out and look for opportunities for good photographs. They don’t wait for the photo to drop in their lap, but they are absolutely ready for when one appears.

Lastly, seek out good training, something that will show you what good performance looks like and then show you a way to get there. We don’t know what we don’t know, and a good trainer can help fill in those gaps. Next up, we’ll talk about how to prioritize your training.