Guest Post - Better Pictures by Shooting Less (by Konrad Dwojak)
LIME is still a two-man-band. Two people can create quite some music together but the amount of performances and their style are limited. To offer a bigger variety of articles, views and techniques we want to start working with guest contributors on LIME. If you have something that might be suited for LIME, please contact is.
We’ll start this series with an article by Konrad Dwojak. Konrad is a young talented and motivated photographer who wrote an article on his way to improve his pictures. Here it is:
Better Pictures by Shooting Less (article by Konrad Dwojak)
I was looking over some of my older photography gear few weeks ago and obviously I ran across my old film cameras and old memory cards from my first digital cameras. I started to recall the times of film photography and compare it with the experience of the digital world.
It took me awhile (being so deep in digital cameras nowadays) to realize that film cameras limited me by certain number of pictures a photographic film roll could contain (not like digital cameras, which can take from few hundred to few thousand RAW pictures, depending on the capacity of a memory card). The limitation of a number of ‘exposures’ (in photographic jargon of course) in film cameras forced me to spend some time and think about a composition of a picture, how to frame a subject, inspect closely foreground, background, double check the lighting and any other details that could improve a picture so that no film would be wasted. This limitation of a film camera was (and for someone who uses a film camera still is) a very important step in the learning process of the art of photography and I personally believe that it still should be a part of the learning process of photography.
I think that digital cameras with their huge memory cards give us the freedom that actually does more harm than good for those who want to learn photography – we don’t take that extra time and effort on checking a composition of a picture like in a film camera because we know that we can re-take a picture countless times and delete easily ‘bad’ pictures without any financial costs (as it wasn’t the case in the photographic film roll era).
I think I have found a solution for those who own only digital cameras and who want to learn composition in a way it was done before. The solution is quite simple: next time you will go for a photo walk, do an assignment for yourself or just take pictures, leave your 8 or 16 GB memory card at home and take with you only one memory card of 1GB or even less (the less capacity, the better; I just checked that 1GB for shooting 12.1 MP RAW will give you about 68 exposures). Depending if you shoot RAW or JPEG and how many megapixels your camera has, you should find a memory card that enables you to take not more than 30 exposures. And remember to leave all other memory cards at home! This way you will limit your gear but you will definitely expand your knowledge and experience in composition!
I strongly encourage you to try it out few times and I guarantee that you will see improvement in your photography soon.
Happy Shooting!!!
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At LIME we believe in offering a platform to views and opinion by photographers we respect. It’s even possible that we don’t agree with some of the views of our guest contributors but we do respect every opinion.
Dear Konrad,
you make a valid point. Indeed, by limiting the number of exposures, you force yourself to think a little harder about composition and lighting before you press the shutter. I couldn’t agree more.
However, I’d like to comment on the fact that you state that “digital …. actually does more harm than good for those who want to learn photography”. This could be correct for someone who’s just “snapping away” hoping to come up with a lucky winner. But for the devoted student, digital is a blessing as you learn immediately from what you’re doing, you can correct on the go and - thanks to the exif data - be able to see how you took that specific shot. This was virtually impossible in the days of film ….
My experience was that, when a transitioned into digital photography, my (final) image(s) were better than when I used film (although, admittedly, I photographed more and took more shots of the same subject - untill I got what I wanted).
Nevertheless, I would indeed encourage every one to take up the challange to come up with interesting shots by using a limited amount of space on a memory card. Shooting Tifs will also help to quickly use up the amount of space on the card
Kind regards
Jürgen
Hello Jürgen,
and thank you for the comment. Somehow I knew that this sentence is a little controversial and that it would stimulate discussion, which actually makes me very happy indeed! I completely agree with you. Besides, there are always ‘two sides of a coin’ and I believe it’s important to find something in the middle: learn proper composition and take an advantage of the digital era. I wrote this article after I met with a person who was just snapping pictures away (I mean literally, taking 20 pictures of the same subject, with the same lighting conditions, etc.) hoping to get a nice shot but even without taking time to look at the results on the display at the back of his camera. Anyway, thanks for taking time to read the article!
Best,
Konrad
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with high volumes of shots if your making minor tweaks to try to achieve perfection, but it’s not good when somone keeps their finger down hoping for a “lucky shot”.
Great photographers are those that can re-create a shot they did in the past with not much effort.
I think it also depends on the photographer and their style of shooting.
For example, there’s a well known (on the web) photographer that is constantly taking pictures … constantly.
This works fine for them as that’s how he works, every day a few thousand images (he has staff to manage them).
Conversely there’s a very saught after UK wedding photographer that, when he shoots, takes no more than 200 images during an entire wedding.
Then they’ll spend days turning it into an album.
Different approaches to the same goal - kick ass pictures
CW
I would love to challenge myself duck taping my screen for a shoot.
To work with my knowledge of light and composition, without instant control and hence adjustments when I look at the back of my camera.
A 1MB card wouldn’t be the solution for me, I would only delete the photo’s I didn’t like and reshoot them.
Nice discussion, though!