This is excellent advice, especially with an SLR camera where the view blacks out at the moment of exposure. You may not know for sure what you've caught on film until the prints are processed. And, of course, there are often subtle nuances that you may not have noticed in the viewfinder that become evident when looking at the prints.
Last year I attended a workshop in available light portrait photography. It was strongly suggested that one should make a lot of exposures. After the workshop I went to a nearby zoo and found a seemingly static subject - a little boy being held on his father's back while watching an elephant. I shot an entire roll of this scene, and believe me when I tell you there wasn't much difference from one exposure to the next. But, when all the prints were laid out for viewing, subtle differences could be seen - the tilt of the boy's head, a finger curled one way or another, a slight shift in body posture, and so on. These things were not always obvious in the viewfinder, and were not always obvious in the prints, either. Yet it was clear that, amongst these seemingly similar photographs, one or two stood out as best capturing the subject. Sometimes there's just too much going on in a scene - even a simple scene - for the photographer to be fully aware of everything. A few months ago I watched a pro, using a Hasselblad, photograph the owner of a produce market. He shot 36 exposures of the owner sitting on a box surrounded by piles of fruit. Essentially the same pose. He was looking for subtle differences in facial expressions, the way a hand was held, and so on. He then made a slight change in the lighting, moved a box, and shot another three rolls of film. All in all, he exposed 144 frames while I was watching, using just four slightly different poses. He was shooting before I arrived, and was shooting still when I left. I'll bet he ran through at least twice as much film as I saw him shoot ... all for just a couple of poses, many of which were quite similar. Cotty wrote: > Shoot shoot shoot! Shoot as much as you can. Be selective: three complete > rolls of the same person in various poses might only yield 2 decent > pictures! Well, it does with me. If I get one per roll I'm laughing! But > then I'm very strict. If it's not perfect, nobody else sees it... -- Shel Belinkoff mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~belinkoff/ http://home.earthlink.net/~belinkoff/darkroom-rentals/index.html - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
