[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
250 frames in a day seems a lot for casual shooting on a vacation...
I wasn't "casual shooting on a vacation". Part of my trip was a
holiday with friends; the other part was making photographs to be
processed and built into several portfolios, hangings and books.
Shel wrote:
Sheesh! 250 exposures a day is a lot. Over the course of an 8
hour day,
that's more than one exposure every two minutes, assuming you don't
break
for lunch, afternoon tea, or go to the bathroom. And on a busy day
that
works out to be closer to one per minute, not considering breaks.
Applying statistics to shooting like this isn't really sensible. My
"days" tended to be 13-16 hours out and about with the camera with me
at all times. Exposures got made in bursts, perhaps at times several
dozen in a few minutes with an interesting scene or subject matter,
and at other times a couple now and then as scenes and subjects
happened. Several days had virtually no shooting at all too, as I was
in transit or tired or just not motivated. All told, I averaged 133
exposures for every day of the trip (21 days total), but my average
on shooting days was about 250.
...
An exposure every 12 seconds or so doesn't seem like much thought
went into
composition or framing ... but then, I can see the desire to shoot
a lot
and shoot fast in some circumstances.
Exactly. I don't walk around like an automaton and press the button
every 12 seconds. I look at a subject or scene carefully, then shoot
as many frames as I think I need to get what I want out of it. Some
scenes only one exposure is made, and that's all the opportunity
there might be. For other scenes and situations I might make three
dozen looking for "the one", with different settings.
Speaking only for myself, a slower
approach often seems to work better. Anyway, there's a difference
between
a burst of enthusiastic shooting and making a lot of exposures
consistently
over a protracted period of time. I don't think I've the stamina
for it.
But then again, maybe with a digi I will ...
Remember that there's no downside to making more exposures with a
digital capture camera. Any waste exposures can be deleted and the
storage card re-used.
It invites a more opportunistic approach than film does ... I've
sometimes been fascinated with doing a study on something that I KNOW
has only 1 chance in 500 of making it as a photo, but I can spend a
hundred exposures on it, trying different angles, different ideas,
without any need to reload film or worry about another $20 worth of
film and processing being wasted. When I work with a tripod on static
subjects, I tend to make a lot of exposures at slightly different
exposure settings, to determine which nets the best expression in
tonality and color. When I'm street shooting, I might make fewer
exposure changes but more total exposures to capture nuances of
expression and angle of approach.
Shel (visions of gigabytes dancing through my head)
Yes, it involves gigabytes of image data. I returned from my trip
with 28-29G worth of exposures to work on. I've currently identified
and sorted out about 8 themes from that work, suitable to develop
into shows and books, which is what I'm working on now.
When I took the Hasselblad SWC with me on a similar trip in 2002, I
consumed about 20 rolls of 12 exposure film in a two week period.
Lots of excellent work came out of it, but the keeper percentage
(keepers/total exposures) turns out to be pretty similar. With a
faster camera, then, I am more productive in unit time. ;-)
One of my favorites from that trip was this photo taken at Point of
Ayre on the Isle of Man:
http://homepage.mac.com/ramarren/photo/PAW2/37.htm
Godfrey
