Photography: Quantity versus Quality

Dear Elvira,
I think the choice also depends on the situation, busy or not busy, landscape photography vs. action photography, etc...

If you have plenty of time for the composition and to carefully check all the settings, then you can indeed achieve your intended goal with fewer photos. But if, for example, you start with sports photography, you usually don't even have time to check your photos on the spot. Then it's normal that you take more photos. At tourist spots, it's very easy to say that you should just take up another position to get a better camera angle. But sometimes you're also limited in time there, or there are too many people. And then you're quickly inclined to take a series of photos a bit faster and then, at home, calmly pick out the best photos and edit them if necessary. If you photograph in RAW, you do that anyway. So to answer your question: I wouldn't feel guilty if I came home with a few too many photos. If you can filter out one good one, very few people will ask you how many photos you took for it. If you enjoy shooting photos, then go for it.
Sometimes people say that you should also take the time to enjoy the situation, separate from your camera. That may well be true, but if you're constantly looking for a good photo, my experience is that I usually have seen more than, for example, my wife, who casually walks through the landscape, the city or the museum. Here too, just do what you yourself enjoy.

A recognizable problem with many nuances. Perhaps there are two questions everyone should first find an answer to. 1) What do you want to achieve with photography? 2) Do you want to capture something or do you want to create a work of art?

In the present time with high-resolution system cameras and high-resolution smartphones with cameras, it is a different story than in the days of analogue photography.

In the analogue days, you worked with expensive film and needed time to have your film developed. In the digital age, both arguments have disappeared.

Compare a roll of KB film (35mm) with 36 exposures with a 64GB memory card with around 4000 exposures in price and you will soon be convinced that there is a very substantial difference in the cost of the material.

What was good about the analogue era was that, because of the cost, you were forced to choose the right composition and exposure. Taking ten photos and then deciding at home which one was the best was not an option. The advantage was that the first photo was usually good.

Very strange is that I still experience this now. Taking a photo of a subject and then, just to be sure, trying a number of other viewpoints and settings still results in the first one usually being good for me. So I am economical with the shooting material.

As already said, that necessity no longer exists nowadays. Going out for an afternoon and taking 100 to 250 photos (usually with the smartphone at 12MB) is not uncommon. It can be explained with the slogan: Not because it has to, but because it can. The only question is: what do you do with all those photos?

On TV you often see people at major occasions taking photos with their smartphones and then going home to look at what they saw that day. I have my own thoughts about that. That mega mountain of photos may be viewed one more time and otherwise they just take up space in the memory. But why worry when it is 128GB.

The great advantage of the smartphone is convenience. You always have it with you and taking a photo is a matter of aiming and clicking. With such a photo, there is nothing for the photographer to set and it is only about the composition and, for the advanced photographer, the angle of the lighting.

The system camera remains unsurpassed. Yes, I must honestly admit that I work more with my iPhone-11Pro than I could ever have imagined. Still, the Canon EOS 5Dmk4 goes in the bag when serious work needs to be done.

I often photograph landscapes and cityscapes and of course nothing beats the Canon for that.

Perhaps the most plausible comment is: you have to move with the times...

You write so nicely, Elvira.
You have a clear vision, 😉despite your meanderings.
In this digital age, it is indeed many times easier to take lots of photos, view them quickly and edit them yourself. I also experienced the analogue era (damn, I’m really starting to get old, aren’t I🙈), and then you really are careful with taking your precious photos. That analogue era shaped me, and I suspect many others along with me, by learning to look, having an idea beforehand of what you roughly want to achieve, carrying out your idea, and then came the waiting and asking yourself whether it had even worked at all.
Personally, I am grateful for both the analogue and digital eras and still enjoy all the moments when I view the world through the (viewfinder) lens of my camera.

I read your article with great pleasure, thank you!

By limiting yourself, you save a lot of selection time. Too many photos, too many emails, etc. limit your quality time. But it remains difficult.

Ah, the comparison between analog and digital....... Expensive or cheap? Back then I worked with a Nikon F2 Photomic, bought for Fl. 800. When digital cameras of comparable quality came along, they suddenly were gigantically more expensive than the analog ones. So there is more to say about costs than just the price of the rolls of film.
I agree that it is now simpler to shoot lots of photos. You can easily delete the lesser ones, after all. And if you are in the experimentation phase I think you generally take lots of photos. If you know what it should become there are fewer and you even deliberately don't take certain photos. Divergent or convergent, are you working with a precisely defined goal or not? Do you impose limitations on yourself before you start? Are you going to take a landscape photo and still take your macro lens and extension tubes with you or do you limit yourself to the wide-angle lens. Those are, in my opinion, the underlying questions in your nice article/

Paulussie wrote on Tuesday 5 January 2021 at 17:47  | reply

Nice article.
The question at the beginning about whether it's a good thing if you take 600 photos in a day is a good opener.
Recently read a piece by someone who had taken hundreds of
"Photos" of his little dog in one afternoon. Can you really still call that photography, rather registration. I think you would be better off using that term then.
I can imagine that professionals who take sports photos make a lot of shots in the hope of finding the good one among them, but as an amateur and professional who wants to make those good shots, you will limit yourself sooner.
I'm currently scanning my analogue photos, and over the past few days I had my 1991 holiday in Normandy and Paris in the scanner. Two weeks, 290 b/w shots, and a few slide and color negative "rolls". And everything is on them.
My last holiday on the costas, digitally, produced about a similar number.
With such numbers, you can also still look at them when you're back. If you take 500 a day, you'll never look at them again, too much hassle.

It also depends on what you photograph. If I go out to photograph a landscape or in a city, I am selective and usually come home with few, but generally good photos. But if I photograph a vintage car tour (I usually take panning shots of that) then it is on burst mode and it happens that I come home with 1500 or 2000 photos. A lousy job to sort through, but I want/need to have at least one successful photo of every participant from the left and right side. With 150 participants, that means at least 300 photos anyway. Just to indicate that one type of photography turns out very differently from another type. You also do portrait photography much more selectively. And everything has its own charm.