Blog Post #15

How prolific do you need to be ?

In these days of high density and fast SD Memory Card storage, fast continuous drives and “Burst” mode on phone cameras, it is very easy to take an incredible number of photographs in a short space in time. It is also a quick way to fill up your memory storage on your camera memory card or phone. What are you going to do with all of those similar images? If you are disciplined you will edit your work and select the best shot(s) from each batch and delete the rest. If on the other hand you are lazy or don’t have a workflow process you will leave them and wonder why you are getting “Memory Full” messages.

If you shoot with film (and many people still do), you apply a completely different level of discipline to your work. You will have 12, 24 or 36 exposures on the film roll so you are constrained, in a good way, to be more selective about what pictures you take and making sure your camera is set correctly for each exposure. This is the world I grew up in and learned my photographic craft in. Each exposure was precious and had to count. You may bracket exposures now and again, but you always had to keep an eye on how many exposures you have left on the roll.

As we moved into the digital era, I have noticed over the years that the question asked by some photographers has moved from “how many rolls did you shoot” to “how many shots did you take”. I have never understood this question as it is not a meaningful metric on how successful your photography outing had been. I have been in situations where other photographers have asked me this question and I would say something like 130 shots, and they would puff their chest out and say 1600, sometimes even more ! Now it may be that I am not taking enough pictures to review later and pick my best, but thinking about it, I put it down to my film experience days. I know I am also guilty today of looking for just “keepers” and not photographing what I see as I go along. My film archive of thousands of negatives is full of photos I took as I went along so what has changed? I think I may subconsciously be still worrying about that dial that tells me how many exposures I have left. I don’t believe in being trigger happy when it comes to my photography but taking more pictures is something I need to consider.

This is when I started to think of what the great master photographers of the past would do. Most of these would have shot on film stock and processed their own images. These icons all have their “signature” images, the ones that get published whenever we see their name. They will also have published books of say 60-100 images and may have had say ten different books printed with these shots also featuring in exhibitions. Over their lifetime, that doesn’t add up to a lot of the photos they actually took, so where are the others?

One of my favourite photographers is Elliott Erwitt, because I like so may of his photographs. This is what I would class as one of his signature images “Dog Legs”. It made we wonder in the context of being prolific, how many shots of this did he take? Was it a one off exposure ? I was reading an article about Erwitt in a back number of B&W Photography magazine recently. Whilst researching his back catalogue of work for a new book, he uncovered a box that had not been opened for about 80 years (he is currently 92). The box had been scrawled with the inscription “Dont bother, pix useless”. The box contained over 600,000 previously unseen images. Time had rendered these photographs to be of great value today albeit he didn’t rate them when he reviewed them at the time. The 600,000 were eventually whittled down to 171 which made it to the book stage. The book was appropriately entitled “Found Not Lost”.

This really opened my eyes to the concept of being a prolific photographer. It shows that we have only seen a very small percentage of the photographs that, in this case, Erwitt created. This could have been just one box of many over the years that was labelled “Pix Useless”, and what about the number of boxes that would have been labeled “Pix acceptable”? If they were useless then why did he keep them? How many photographs did he take (and is still taking) during his life as a photographer?

I suppose I had my Erwitt moment back in 2018. Having recently retired I planned to go through my negative archive and decide what goes onto my website and into the three archive image Zines I have produced. When I contemplate my own negative archive I too have never thrown any of my negatives away. When I look at each individual negative though they are all unique as I did not have the luxury (like Erwitt) of motor drives on my film cameras or access to an endless supply of film, paper and processing materials.

If I have one regret looking back through my archive is that I wasn’t as prolific as I should have been. That said, I was young and self-financing my hobby so resources were limited. These days resources are not an issue but I still seem to have this selective approach to what photos I take. My Lightroom catalogue library, containing all of my digital images, still has many images that haven’t been published but I continue to apply the discipline of consigning to the bin anything that I consider a fail or duplicate.

One other point of which I am fully aware of is that I am of an age where there is more sand in the bottom half of the hour glass than there is in the top half. Taking a lot of images with a view to publishing them in later years probably wouldn’t be a good strategy. I often use the analogy that my photography style seems to be more sniper than shotgun approach. Maybe I need to think more about adopting the shotgun approach ?

Thank you for reading this blog post. I’m sorry but I don’t include a comments or “Like/Dislike” button. If you want to contact me you can do so by using the “Contact Me” facility in the website header.

Peter Degnan