anyway nice site and nice comment

I just got back from holiday to find this article published on DPS.

I enjoyed reading the comments posted. Perhaps my advice was a little ambiguous in the article, so thought I’d just clear it up a bit:

I wasn’t really advocating taking hundreds of photos and hoping for the best. I’m all in favour of only taking as many photos ‘as you need to’, but frequently this point is a self-imposed limitation.

My point was to when you think you’re done, try to squeeze a little more creativity out of yourself, really push yourself to keep going and often you’ll sight a new opportunity or a new perspective on a scene that you thought you were done with.

Hope that makes sense.

Sincere thanks to everyone who read this article, left their thoughts, or took the time to view my site. Cheers!

and let’s all shoot less and work more for it

thanks everyone who participated in this discussion, it’s been fun so far :)

” . . . creativity comes from within you, not your camera, so the photos should come from you. . . Don’t go with statistical photography, go with intelligent one.”

I agree, the old adage; less is more is a worthy thing to strive for. I am shooting lots at the moment, but just because i’m relatively new to photography. I guess like you say we should strive to be DOING our best, and not just HOPING for the best.

Another top article, and discussion.

Cheers everyone.

and yeah i think that’s the main point here. shoot as much as you need to in order to learn the mechanisms but make sure that your purpose is to see the image in your mind before you shoot it.

I agree with some of your points. You should not just quickly take a ton of a shots of a subject and pray for one to be good. Creativity and artistic styles are what seperates you from everyone else. Finding your own personal style and using that to build on. But the way I see it is I have 2x 2GB memory cards.. Thats gives me 4GB of raw to work with every weekend I go shooting. I must say that many many times I have thought I had the prfect shot. I spent my time setting it up and getting right angle… But get home load it in Aperture and one bit of the subject is slightly out a focus.. This ruins the image therfor making you loose what could have been a great image. I would rather snap off 5 shots of that subject with slightly different apertures and exposure and make off with one that is really great and delete the rest. Sure it can be a little bit of a pain to have to delete them from your database, But I think that is much better than loosing out on what could have been a great photo. Perhaps once your really used to your lens and camera you wont need to worry about shots not being how you expected but for me it is deffinitly needed.

I have become quite addicted to it here.

Thanks Darren!!!

why do i preach this? it’s first because of workflow issues. cataloguing and tagging and sorting and backup are a real hassle with many, useless files. also, in case of a backup you either waste space with many dead ones or you take a very long time to weed out the crappy ones.

finally i’ll give you a practical example. i used to be a magazine photographer. and i would go to all these places and take photos of people. to be on the safe side, i’d take approx 200-300 photos a shoot just to make sure. thing was i spent more time shooting than adjusting the controls and basically reshooting the same boring and/or wrong thing from different angles. then i decided to cut back on that, since PP itself was really long and i only needed max 5 photos for an article. i started shooting less, like 70, even around 30-40 at times, taking more time to think about the shots and less time actually clicking like a madman. and this was fast, i only had 30min or so to take these so i had to choose more photos or more thinking. in the end shooting less simplified my existence and all my work photos from that mag are sitting nice and cozy on a DVD on some shelf waiting recovery. however, my 8000 normal pics were wiped out when my hard drive died because they were too many to sift through and only archive the good ones. so i delayed it until they were gone.

my point is, shoot only as much as you need. there;s no need to shoot 15 photos of the same thing. envision it in your mind, and if you can’t do that take the 15 photos come home and make sure you understand from them at least how tomorrow to take 14. main thing is, creativity comes from within you, not your camera, so the photos should come from you.

give yourself time but learn. you’ll see, exposure takes little to master. try sunny f16. try winging and bracketing. try guessing. then, composition also takes little. it’s how you see the thing you wanna photograph. look for vantage points. look for other sides and places to see it from. Learn how to see the photo before you take it and not how to take many photos not to miss anything. Don’t go with statistical photography, go with intelligent one. Be a pro who doesn’t need an LCD screen on his camera. Only then will you be able to use it.

This is my first time leaving a message on a blog. But I recieve the emails everyday!

Go DPS!!!!