Quantity Leads to Quality
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One of the most common mistakes I see in photo classes is that students don’t shoot enough. I don’t mean that they don’t spend enough hours out taking pictures, I mean that when they see a potential subject they don’t shoot enough frames of it. Many people have the mistaken idea that a good photographer walks into a situation, sees their subject, determines how best to shoot it, takes the final shot, and then goes home to wait for that image to appear on the cover of a magazine. Alas, this isn’t true. To get good results, you have to shoot a lot of frames of your subject. This process of working your subject can be a difficult one for some people to learn, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about. |
I was walking on the dry lake bed of Panamint Valley in Death Valley National Park, when I saw this cloud over the horizon:
For whatever reason, it caught my attention, and so I tried to start composing a shot with it. Of course, the odds were very small that I was standing in the very best place to shoot this cloud at the moment it caught my attention. So, I began to move around and continue to shoot, to see what I might come up with.
I started out from this same spot, with slight reframings, moving the horizon up and down, but those shots were barely any different than the one you just saw. This is often the case when you begin to work a subject – you start too timid, afraid to step out of your comfort zone.
Deciding I needed something in the foreground that was as strong a compositional element as the cloud, I moved forward to try to work something up with those small bushes:
This helped, so I shot a few frames, raising and lowering the horizon. At this point, I wasn’t thinking about whether any of the shots were keepers, I was simply trying to grab frames of any possible idea that I might have, with the idea that, when I got home, one of them might turn out to be a winner.
I began to wonder if maybe it was wrong to have something in the foreground. After all, the majesty of the place where I was standing stemmed largely from its emptiness, and empty space often works as compositional weight. So, I walked to the left, until the bushes were out of sight, and shot this:
This was a lucky accident, because by moving here, that small rock moved into frame. Realizing that it might be the foreground element I needed, I took another step to the left:
Ultimately, this was the shot that would become my final image, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I kept shooting. I shot slight differences in framings, and also shot multiple copies of the same framing. It was windy, and I was worried that I might have sharpness problems, so to improve my chances of a particular composition being sharp, I shot multiple frames of it. Fairly quickly, though, the cloud began to break up:
And that’s when I knew I was done. And so, I continued walking until the next thing caught my eye.
When I got home and imported my images, I found myself facing a big mess of thumbnails:
This part of the process is often overwhelming and demoralizing. Overwhelming, because now you have to choose, though I often find the choice part fairly easy, because there will be one frame that stands out. I can get demoralized, though, because most of the shots are bad. And so, it becomes easy to worry that one is a "bad photographer."
The tricky thing about photography is that, technically, every image we produce is a "finished image." It may be a lousy image, and it may have technical problems, but it’s still a complete, photo-quality image. Therefore, it can be difficult to see that many of the shots that we take are akin to sketches that a painter creates. One of the key differences is that a painter knows their sketches are just that, and so they don’t beat themselves up if their sketches are not beautiful, perfect images.
When you’re working a shot, you’re sketching photographically. And just as a painter can rarely get by without their sketching process, so too does the photographer often have to work their shot to come through to a good final image. The trick is to remember to do it, and to remember to go easy on yourself when get home and see all of your "sketch" images.
Because this particular shot was largely an exercise in geometry and composition, and because color was not really a factor in my compositional thinking (despite the fact that the muted pastels of the desert can be very beautiful) I decided that this image would work better in black and white.
As I mentioned earlier, it was not the very last shot that ended up being my final choice. While I didn’t keep those later shots, I’m glad that I kept working, because very often it will be the very final image that is the one that stands out.
Here’s the completed image, after some tonal adjustments, and conversion to black and white:
Of course, instead of actually taking all those shots, you could simply move around your scene and look through the viewfinder. But we use a very different eye when shooting, than we do when looking at final images, and so it can be extremely difficult to judge the quality of a shot while in a shooting frame of mind. Fortunately, shooting digitally is cheap.
Obviously, there are some times when a fleeting moment presents itself, and you simply have to shoot it, and move on. Great street photographers are masters of identifying “decisive moments” and capturing them in a single frame. However, I would argue that they are still working their subject, because for every one of those great decisive moments, they also shoot a lot of less compelling images. Their subject is “the street” and they shoot hundreds of images to get those one or two great shots that we ultimately see.
Working your shot does not make you a wimpy photographer. It is, in fact, how the pros do it.
Read more material on “working the shot” in Chapter 9 of Complete Digital Photography, 5th Edition
Comments
13 Comments on Quantity Leads to Quality
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Jon Griffith on
Mon, 22nd Feb 2010 3:50 pm
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Robert on
Mon, 22nd Feb 2010 4:16 pm
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John on
Mon, 22nd Feb 2010 8:34 pm
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Paul Smith on
Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 12:34 am
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Caroline on
Wed, 24th Feb 2010 1:21 pm
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noj dranrab on
Thu, 25th Feb 2010 3:54 pm
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Ben Long on
Thu, 25th Feb 2010 4:00 pm
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Ben Long on
Thu, 25th Feb 2010 4:02 pm
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noj dranrab on
Thu, 25th Feb 2010 7:31 pm
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Ben Long on
Fri, 26th Feb 2010 12:04 pm
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noj dranrab on
Fri, 26th Feb 2010 8:52 pm
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Terry on
Sat, 27th Feb 2010 12:56 pm
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In2SciFi » Quantity leads to quality on
Sat, 27th Feb 2010 1:01 pm
This is great. This is what I tend to do, more or less, but never really thought about it. The one thing I didn’t realize that I do is the demoralizing for all the bad shots. I honestly thought pros just showed up, took a few great shots and were done. I can’t imagine how it would have been in film. Digital really lets you take all those test shots for free! I just recently bought my first digital SLR and I’m really loving it. Feel free to comment on any of my photographs, I’d love the feedback, critical or otherwise.
It’s always nice to read how someone else is working. I try to not take too many shots. I really hate it when I have a whole bunch of photos that are nearly the same. The weird thing is that usually my first shot/thought was the best. (or in some cases the last as I’m perfecting the photo).
I do take many photo’s if I’m doing macro photography, sharpness can be difficult, every mm matters, sometimes I end up using Lightroom’s Compare View to see the tiny changes in sharpness between images.
If anyone is interested: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baarr/
I agree, the difference with your approach (which I like) and the one used by some people, is that you have thought about what you have taken and adjusted your approach to produce 12 images to work with.
I went to a zoo recently and saw a guy with his brand new Nikon DSLR, with his finger almost permanently stuck to the shoot button, taking in the order of 100 shots of a single giraffe. I felt like asking him how he was going to figure out which one to process and publish…. but kept to myself and admired the giraffe instead.
Great article and thank you for showing us the progression you went through! This is something that only digital photography could bring and is one reason why I’ll often compose something in both portrait and landscape view. Quite often, it isn’t until I start “developing” the images that I realize what I thought looked good in landscape view actually works better in portrait view.
I find myself doing a lot of food photography, since I like cooking as much as I like photography, and I’ll typically take about 20 different shots of a single dish. Halfway through the shoot I might start to get hungry, or worry that my partner is thinking I’ve totally lost it, but in the end I’m grateful I took so many pictures because it’s usually one of the last few that I end up using. By that point I’ve fine-tuned the composition and lighting so much that the final pictures are remarkably better than the first of the set.
Yup. You can shoot a hundred shots, and since at least one is bound to be “acceptable’, you can pretend you’re a photographer. You may know nothing about exposure, and probably nothing about composition, color balance, or even light, and certainly nothing about the theory behind what you are supposed to be doing (photography). I think we need a new name for this new “art form.” I could teach a monkey to hold a camera with his finger on the shutter, spin him around in a circle, and get a “photograph”.
Well noj, I’m afraid that this “monkey” technique has been around for a long time, and practiced by some of the world’s great shooters. Consider this quote from Ansel Adams about Margaret Bourke-White (this is from “Basic Techniques of Photography” by John P. Schaefer.)
“As we chatted, Meg told me that her working method, whenever possible, was to set the shutter at 1/100 second and make exposures with every lens stop from f/4.5 to f/22; one was certain to be perfect!”
In the end, it doesn’t matter what the photographer’s knowledge or methodology is – a good picture is a good picture no matter how it was shot, even if it was just a random shot by a monkey.
Some great points here from everybody. Yes, sometimes the best shot is the first one that I shoot in a batch. It’s interesting how that initial impulse is often the correct one. But then there are those times when it’s the later shots that are the keepers, so “working it” is still the safest approach.
Ok Ben. I agree. A good shot by a monkey is still a good shot. And Margaret may have bracketed her exposures, but did she turn on her auto focus, white balance bracket sequencial shooting, exposure bracketing , anti-shake, auto exposure, and fire off 1000 shots. Some cameras now have a little outline of a head visible on the LCD screen , just in case you don’t know what a head looks like I guess, so you can spot one and line it up with the outline .I know a guy who had a photo published on the cover of a specialty magazine, a wildlife/hunting mag. It was a nice shot. I was a little less impressed when he told me it was culled from over 1000 shots! I bet if I asked him if he understood the reciprocal relationship between shutter speed and aperture , he wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. If I asked him how depth of field related to focal length of the lens and the diagonal of the film or censor size, I would get a blank look. And since you brought up the name of Anselm Adams, I doubt he bracketed at every F-stop with his 4×5 or 8×10 view camera. In fact we know he didn’t. I just think there is a difference between “photography” and the machine-gun, auto-everything , post-process, work-flow activity that passes for it today. But hey, it’s good for the Japanese economy anyway! How about we push it a little further down the slippery slope? How about a “robot camera” that you can just send out on its own while you stay home?
Well noj, I often wonder if we already have that robot camera, in the form of flickr. There’s been times when I’ve had my camera up to my eye and thought “why am I taking this picture? I can probably go on flicker and find dozens exactly like this. In fact, I could’ve just stayed home and gotten the same shot off of the web.”
Or there’re those Nikon light meters that have an internal database of tens of thousands of well-exposed images that they use in their exposure calculations. I know they’re not real finished images, but it still makes you wonder “wait a sec, has my light meter already taken this picture?”
Shooting a thousand images of a subject will soon seem paltry, in the face of SLRs with hi-def video capabilities. It’s a little scary how often I hear people saying that the future of photo journalism will be shooters going out and shooting hi def of everything. That way, editors get video that they can compile into video stories, and can just pull the stills they need from the video. This might very well be how things turn out, but it seems like a cumbersome way to work, and also you shoot video differently than you shoot stills.
I agree with you that it seems far more practical to actually learn your craft and shoot intelligently than to just blitzkrieg your way through the shooting day, and then have to cull through a thousand shots to get a keeper. 1000:1 is a pretty lousy shooting ratio, even for a good photographer who shoots a lot of coverage. And yeah, it does seem to cheapen the whole craft.
It’s a tricky question, that one of how important “difficulty” is in the creation of a work. To the viewer, you either have a nice shot or not, and yet we want to feel like real skill is required. But reducing things to only a matter of skill simply turns an art form into an athletic event. It’s tough to know where that balance is. I would hope that the person who’s shooting 1000:1 would ultimately want to learn to employ a little more skill, just for the sake of their own interest. And to keep their storage costs down…
Don’t get me wrong. I shoot both digital and traditional. I shoot with a 4×5, a 6×9, a 6×6, 645, and several digital cameras. I sold my 35mm gear when digital quality improved. It doesn’t make much sense for a pro to shoot anything but digital, at least for commercial purposes. And you’re probably right. Still photography will inevitably give way to video, not just for commercial application but hobbyists as well. But, when I want something to hang on my wall, or something to give as a gift, or something to display in a show, something I can be proud of, I go into the darkroom and pull a favorite neg. i don’t think that will change for me. I’m not sure that it’s the difficulty, although it certainly has something to do with how much of yourself you put into it, and with challenging yourself. And, yes, the proliferation of digital images has cheapened photography, and I think has cheapened “imagery” in general. Imagery has become a commodity.
This debate has been around forever and no one is ever going to resolve it. Whether you take many exposures or just one exposure, the real issue is the image. Ansel Adams quoted earlier in the thread tended toward the single best exposure approach, but his subjects allowed for considerable time to conceive the ‘best picture’ and take it. Henri Cartier-Bresson focused on one exposure in his Decisive Moment approach but might take 2 or 3. On the other end, there are many professional photographers who make stunning images by shooting 10′s or even 100′s in order to capture just the right exposure and are happy to get only one out of the whole group. Neither way of approaching the problem is wrong. Both ways work, but not always with the same subject.
For me, the right way is to be thinking clearly and feeling deeply while I’m shooting. Rather than just snapping away, I do better when I am thinking and feeling the image, to use Ansel Adam’s terms previsualizing the image. When I’m shooting multiple exposures, each exposure is an attempt to improve your how well I’ve captured what I’m thinking and feeling. In some cases, it might mean one exposure carefully thought out and preplanned and in others, it might mean shooting a whole series of photos trying variations to capture the image. The decision is also affected by your tools. When I’m working with my 4X5, I almost always work in the single image approach with single sheet film, though I might take more than one exposure to capture what I think and feel about the subject. On the other end, with digital, I’m more likely to capture multiple exposures that I can review carefully in my digital darkroom. With my film cameras (which I still use) I’m in between the two extremes.
Snapping away without thinking is what gives the multiple exposure approach a bad name. Some people don’t give any thought to what they’re doing and just ‘point and shoot’. A professional will point, think, feel & shoot using multiple exposures to capture exactly what they want to capture rather than make a mistake. They will try to improve each photo in a series or they might experiment with other visualizations. With some subjects such as a fast moving football game or a bunch of 6&7 year olds playing with each other, you need to shoot a lot because things are changing so fast that no single-shot is likely to capture the best images, but you’re still looking ahead in the action to be at the right place and time to capture the instant when it happens.
I completely agree that students of photography SHOULD take lots of pictures, but they should be taken with their head and their heart engaged, working to capture an image rather than just a picture. Experience teaches you to be a photographer, you get experience by taking LOTS of pictures. But all the experience is wasted if you haven’t thought about the picture both before and after you take it.
To quote Ansel Adams “The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good”. His point I believe is not that taking many pictures is a bad thing, but rather that you should not be taking them only hoping you’ll get a good one. Taking them to capture the image in your heart and in your mind, whether you take one or many.
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