A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the historical and charming Quebec City with a friend. On a sunny yet extremely cold Sunday morning, we roamed the streets snapping pictures detailing the old architecture and quaint narrow streetscapes of Old Quebec. We stopped to warm up in a cafe and took turns looking at the pictures I’d taken on my cameras tiny LCD and my friend was surprised at how many pictures I had taken and the varying quality of each. Although he was pretty familiar my Flickr photostream, I realized that viewing these pictures freshly taken on the LCD was quite a different experience for him. Not only were there more pictures, many of them variations on the same theme, but some of them were a bit off - perhaps slightly slanted or in need of a tighter crop. I don’t do a lot of Photoshopping, but I do like to clean the pictures up a bit. My Photoshop philosophy is very similar to my make up philosophy - I’ll darken my eyelashes with a bit of mascara smooth out my complexion a bit of concealer but I don ‘t try to hide the fact that I have freckles or try to convince anyone that my lips are red instead of pink.
All of this got me thinking about the process of taking and sharing pictures. Clearly, the advent of digital photography has changed the way pictures are taken - I can assure you that I wouldn’t have taken 400+ photographs over three days if I was shooting film. I have more pictures of my weekend in Quebec City than I do of film photographs of my trips to Guatemala and Greece combined. Looking back to 2003 when I first started taking digital pictures while traveling Southeast Asia, I took a mere 344 pictures after spending a week at the highly photogenic Angkor Wat. Not only am I now taking more pictures, but I’m also sharing a lot more of them, thanks to great tools like Flickr. As I was browsing my archives, I couldn’t help but wonder what the relationship between pictures taken and pictures posted is and if this relationship changes over time. On the one hand, I like to think that the ratio decreases over time as presumably I’ll be taking better pictures. On the other hand, the more time I spend taking pictures, the more I want to take and the more I want to experiment. I decided to graph the ratio between pictures taken vs. pictures posted over the past six months to see if there were any patterns and came up with the following graph:
From the variation of the graph it looks as though some photo shoots turn out better than others. I also haven’t taken into account that some of those collections include photos for other projects not meant for my Flickr stream. On average though, I upload 19% of the pictures I take from a particular outing which pretty much matches the number that I had in mind before charting the data. I think that this number says a lot about my own creative process. Whether it is photographing or writing, I tent to start out with a sort of “stream of consciousness” approach to get it all out, then edit and revise numerous rough drafts until I feel that I’m happy with the outcome. I’d be interested to hear what other people’s number are - how does selecting and editing impact your own creative process, whether it is writing, painting, photography or any other creative pursuit?