Hi Mike,
A tall request, don't you think? At only your minimum, a minute of framing
per shot is almost three and half hours of continuous shooting a day--not
including travel time to and from location or allowing for scouting around
while on location. If you only give each shot 5 minutes of evaluation once
you get home, you've burned another sixteen and a half hours (roughly)--and
that doesn't include the requisite time spent uploading those hurredly
composed, mind numbing shots into the computer in the first place. Your
schedule only leaves you four hours a day to eat, sleep, bathe, and
procreate (admittedly numbers two and three are frequently low on many
photographers' "to do" list, but items one and four are pretty important to
a fair portion of us)-and where is the time to reflect on what the hell it
is you are trying to accomplish with all this shooting?
And how carefully can you really evaluate the huge number of shots you are
suggesting? Digital certainly makes quantity possible, but quantity is no
guarrantor of quality, is it? I think most of us could quite quickly
consign tens of shots at mouse click to the trash can (or waste bin), but
that _isn't_ the same as going over each shot carefully and evaluating the
strengths and weaknesses of each shot. Plus, what are we comparing so many
shots to? The fractionally different version ahead of or behind it?
If I took hundreds of hurried shots a day (and I have on a few expensive
occasions), how can I really recall what I was trying to do differently in
each shot? Wouldn't it be more efficient for me to shoot everything I saw
at random (bracketing, of course) and pray something worthwhile turned up
once a day (or week, or month, or whatever)?
Even if film were as cheap as bits, wouldn't we all be better off spending
far more time thinking and composing? Is learning photography just pressing
the button as many times we can in a given amount of time?
Dan Scott (being the devil's advocate)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Actually, after writing the above I realized that for some people (sports
or action photographers, for instance) shooting continuously for that long
is par. But, for those of shooting landscapes or other somewhat static
subjects, your suggested rate of fire seems like overkill.
Mike wrote:
>I think we may be about to undergo a revolution in process issues, because
>it has suddenly gotten easy and very cheap. Buy a <$1K digital camera and a
>bunch of cards. Try _everything_ you can think of; experiment constantly;
>shoot at least a couple of hundred pictures every day. Then go through them
>on the monitor, look at each carefully, compare your result with what you
>were trying for, learn to appreciate the snapshots and the felicitous
>accidents...and keep no more than a handful to commemorate each outing's
>shooting, say five or so. Don't make prints.
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