Less Photography means More Improvement

One of the worst things about being a photographer is always seeking the perfect shot. Particularly when you know that it doesn’t work that way. Wait, yes it can. You can spend every moment of your day taking trillions of photographs in the vain hope that one of them will be perfect…

But if you shoot only with digital so you can shoot until your battery screams ‘NO MORE, PLEASE NO MORE!’, you are doing it all wrong.

Ideally, and firstly, change your camera back to SINGLE-shots, not multi-fire. Whilst multi-fire is both useful and often required, it is ultimately very lazy. Unless you are shooting a fast-action sport where you are required to bring home the unusual shots (accidents, etc), multi-fire is not required for most users. Portrait, wedding, landscape and still life photographers really shouldn’t be using it.

I’ve made that mistake. The Canon 50D has both fast and slow multi-fire, and neither really have been useful for me. Not yet. I have a 500GB hard-drive filled with shots from locations where ONE shot was more than sufficient. I’m now unashamedly going through gigabytes of photographs to clean out the pointless duplicates and triplicates.

Digital is how it will stay now that film is neither developed nor created by the big companies. But we can still shoot with the same style as our film-shooting mentors did all those years ago. Or as you did back in 1990 with your $30,000 200MB Kodak DCS-100 dSLR.

What’s my point? So do yourself a favour, shoot sparingly to save yourself time later:

Take it easy, walk around the shoot to find the best location at which to compose your shot, consider the light, the colouring, the shapes and lines. Then shoot once to test the light (unless you still use a spot-meter), a second time to adjust contrast, f-stops, etc … and maybe a 3rd time with monochrome. I like doing this when out on Kangaroo Island where access to a computer is 8-hours away. Monochrome helps me find where the light works best in a composition.)

Stop filling up the internet or your hard-drive with trillions of gigabytes of duplication. Change the way you shoot to correct your composition to improve your capability. Think between shots about how you can improve, and you will.

/end rant.