More on Quality and Quantity

There's much interesting reading in Chantal Stone's post here and in the comments of her readers.

Chantal writes: "This brings up an intersting topic for discussion. Does quanity equal quality? Or does quantity inspire quality? By shooting all the time, of course one will improve as a photographer...practice makes perfect afterall."

It's not so much that I'm advocating the idea that quantity is the same as quality. What I'm advocating, really, is the idea that if improving the quality of your work as a whole is a goal, then one very successful but non-intuitive approach to realizing that goal is to work toward quantity, and not quality.

Paradoxically, I find that I get my best work when I stop worrying about quality. If I stand there behind the camera and tripod, and think "Right. Now, I'm going to look for the really excellent photographs, and ignore the not very good ones", I come home with nothing but dreck. If I go out with the camera, and I just photograph everything that captures my attention, I become more involved with the process, my linear/rational mind gets out of the way, and I come home with better work (and often with a few positive suprises).

This is related, I think, to exposure resistance, where we try to edit our work at exposure time. My personal experience is that I'm a terrible editor when I'm behind the camera. That's not the time for me to be thinking about whether I'm getting good stuff, or bad stuff, or stuff that's good enough. It's the time for me to be taking the photographs I find, as I find them, and leaving the editing decisions for later. It's not the time to be thinking about the future, it's the time to be right there, in that spot at that moment, not just looking at what's around me but actually seeing it.

Chantal also writes "But isn't true improvement measured by the ratio of 'good' images vs. how many images taken?" I just completely disagree with this. I'm not even sure how much I think improvement ought to be measured by the number of 'good' images. If I'm making the photos I want to be making right now, and the work is progressing - that's success. If I am progressing by coming home time after time with nothing but crap, but I'm slowly learning what I need to learn to make the photos I want to make - that's STILL success.

There's also stuff in Chantal's post (and more in the comments) that seems to be about mistaking quantity of work for number of exposures of a single scene. It's an understandable confusion, but it's not what I'm getting at when I say "Quantity is Quality". I'm not advocating hooking an intervalometer to your camera, setting it to release the shutter once a second, and then holding the camera strap and swinging the camera around your head until the memory card is full. I'm advocating doing what you do now - if that's portrait sessions, do more portrait sessons. If it's landscape photographs, go out into the landscape twice as often. Just doing the same thing but releasing the shutter twice instead of once for each photo won't do much.