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?
Amy, I have a similar story, with a twist.
I entered the photographic world as a large format photographer, shooting 5×7-inch sheet film with a big wooden camera. I still carry the rig aroud in my car, padlocked against theft, in hopes of seeing something worthy of the fifteen minutes spent setting up, moving around, metering the scene, making the exposure, and breaking down the camera.
Furthermore, loading and unloading sheet film is time-consuming, as is developing it (you can process maybe five to ten sheets at one time–any more than that and you will surely scratch the sensitive emulsion against the edges of the other sheets of film. Then I print on paper that I’ve hand-coated emulsion onto. Coating and drying takes about 30 minutes per sheet, and maybe another ten minutes to an hour to expose the paper and negative to make a print. Then another 20 minutes in developer and clearing baths.
So, as you can tell, I am very picky about what I make images of with this camera. I might make two images a month, although I generally run through about 100 sheets a year. Out of those, a high percentage–maybe 70 of them–are what I would consider printable. I am editing before I make the image. So I find myself “taking pictures” with my eyeballs a lot more often than I take them with a camera and a lens.
So: a 70% “taken” versus “posted” (or in my case, printed) ratio. Pretty high. But then, remember, I probably don’t hestitate to drive right past some shots that I’d shoot with a digital camera.
On the other side of the coin, I have a little digital camera that I shoot about 20 images a week with. Lots of stuff around the house, photos of the kids, the dog, fences on our walks, home-made meals, etc. The interesting thing is that this camera acts, for me, much like the Leica did for photojournalists in the 40s and 50s. It’s small, and I carry it in my pocket, and pull it out and make images whenever I see anything even vaguely interesting. Consequently, the ratio of junk to gems is quite high. But it does make for a very interesting set of images that I’d never, ever, catch with a large-format camera. Look at Garry Winogrand’s contact sheets some day and you’ll see it.
Josef Sudek used a small camera to catch the minutae of his life in his small home and little garden, and ended up with a collection of images which take my breath away. They are very profound in capturing the ordinariness of his life, and his place, and they describe a beauty that can only be captured here and there, as one passes by–and much more easily with a smaller camera.
I post about 30% of those pictures captured with my little pocket camera (and would post an even smaller percentage if I didn’t have a Pro account with the nearly unlimited bandwidth). And I think that in some of these images, I’ve started to see things that I’d never considered regarding photographically, because I’ve spent over 14 years looking at things from the perspective of a large format photographer. I see a lot of seemingly mundane things become beautiful when I simply look at them. And while this is no less true for what I photograph with my large format camera, these are different things, in a different world, and it is that differentness that I find so refreshing for my personal vision right now.
Thanks for bringing up this point; it’s important.
Last year I visited thirteen countries, and posted just over 1500 photos on Flickr from the trip. I now have about 4500 archived photos from the trip overall, so I published a third of what I kept - but that’s only what I kept (and I lost a lot of shots as well). I remember that most photos I deleted last year I did within ten seconds of taking them. Most of last year’s photos were very ordinary and were about nothing more than providing a visual record of the trip - so they were different maybe to a picture that has a creative process behind it. I took a lot of shots with my camera on the end of an outstretched arm, one hanging out the side of a moving train, and several taken by tour guides who held the camera at funny angles - but those are also the ones that I’ve kept almost without exception. Your post has made me think about how we perceive photos differently depending on whether they are part of a narrative, a theme, or standing alone.
I’m rather clumsy when it comes to technically more proficient photos, and have found that my best photos are more the result of happy chance than anything - I’m also not so hot on Photoshopping things, and tend to find that if increasing contrast and decreasing brightness by 5 to 10% each doesn’t make the photo look better, not a lot will. When I’m actually concentrating on getting a particular photograph, I take a lot of pictures to get what I want - no numbers available, but at least ten taken to each good photo.
The thing is, I now know that there are a lot of photos I wish I’d never got rid of, even if I wasn’t going to put them on Flickr. I have a box which contains the first two or three hundred photos I took after I was given my first real camera, an old manual aperture priority SLR - and it’s fantastic to look through them now - blurred, badly exposed, poorly composed, they are however irreplaceable - a vivid record of time over fifteen years ago. They’re also always quite new to me, as I don’t have the relationship with them that I do with my best photographs. It’s strange. There are the pictures you take, less you keep, still less you show to others, and as you said, the whole stream of consciousness that played a part in how the pictures were taken and how they end up being organised. A clever enough quack could probably tell someone a lot about themselves based on their photography.
Thanks - I’m going to go and take a look in the box!
Alan and Nathan - thank you both for your great comments and taking the time to make them!
Alan - I am impressed that you still carry around that large wooden camera. It is a fantastic piece of equipment and I wouldn’t even know where to begin using it. It sounds as though a lot of work is involved so I can see why you would want to be so selective and why you would do you editing before taking the shot as opposed to after. Thanks as well to the links to Winogrand and Sudek’s work - I don’t know a lot about the history of photography so it is interesting to see how photography has developed over the years (pun intended!).
Nathan - glad to hear that you are going to peer into the box and rediscover some of your old shots. I’m sure that it will be an interesting experience and you are fortunate to have kept them so that you can reflect upon them now. I know that I have learnt a tremendous amount about myself through the pictures I’ve taken and I think that the act of taking pictures, as well as reflecting on one’s own pictures, is a great tool for self-discovery. So happy (inner) travels!
A point which you’ve both brought up is the reason for taking photos and how that affects the editing process. There are the shots that you plan and the shots than work out by chance. There are the big moments that scream out to be documented as well as the small details that yearn to be discovered. I think that the power of digital technology is that it has given us the ability o take all kinds of photographs - we can capture the planned ones, snap up the unexpected ones, edit beforehand or selectively edit them later - and share these images with a wider audience, thanks to tools like Flickr.
Digital is so cool. Now real skill is all the seperates the pro from the hacker. Sounds like you enjoyed Quebec?
I will not go through the exercise and start counting the pictures I have taken over the last couple of months and those posted. I guess, the ratio would be even lower than yours, Amy.
Still, I know that the numbers of pictures taken has exponentially increased. So what about quality and quantity in my case?
Namibia was my first trip where I did more than just occasionally shoot some pictures. In four weeks, I did about 30 rolls of film, i.e. about 1000 shots. That was in 1991. Of those I kept about 100 slides as “favorites” - I scanned about 20 of them for my private website. This does not mean, that I would consider only 10% as good enough to keep or 2% as “sharable”. Because: taking widelife photos by definition generates a lot of excess photos and going through the hassle of scanning etc. also reduces the number of pictures collected or shared. The number of pictures taken is not ncessarily defined by Digital or Film per se but also by what pictures you take. But true: digital photography in my case INCREASED the number of pictures taken.
Same for Street Photography. I only started to do some street photography since I went digital. I first did so when visiting Maroco in Dec 2004, in spring 2005 in Zurich and again in China in late 2005 (see my flickr sets for all of them). The number of shots taken has exploded, but I guess, I also did some pictures that I would not have tried to do on Film. The chance of getting a particular shot right at the first time was just to small (e.g. of some motion blurred street life). Hence, does digital photography INCREASE the opportunities to do a decent pictures?
Another indicator is time spend working with pictures. Usually, the slides I made when travelling kept me busy for a couple of evenings. Sitting bended over my lightbox and sorting out the good and bad ones was a rather fast processes. Totally different now: it took me ages to sort out the slides from Maroco and China (although in the latter case, pictures taken with my broken camera required a little bit more postprocessing). Sure this extra time spend with my digital photos is caused by about factor 10 of pictures taken (I did a couple of thousands in China). Still, the biggest difference was not just numbers of pictures taken. It was the time a spend PER PICTURE taken. I could easily “safe” a picture I would have thrown away if it would be on Film. Hence, digital photography in certain cases INCREASES the share of usable pictures.
And then, on the other side, I often hear myself complaining that since I use my digital camera, I do not take enough time to “think” about a picture, that the quality of pictures taken has decreased. Is this really true? Thinking about it, I come to another conclusion: I do MORE pictures, I take new sorts of pictures I wouldn’t have taken before and amongst them there are MORE pictures I would consider sharable. But, I have do admit that for “regular” motifs, the quality of “in-camera” pictures has declined. The latter however, is often compensated by postprocessing/photoshopping such pictures. In addition, I realize that from a single picture I often “produce” 2 or 3 pictures in different tones or with different cropping, each special in its own way. Hence, the quality and share of usable “in-PC” pictures not necessarily declined.
And my last comment: I was always interested in doing B/Ws. Still, setting up a dark-room, mixing chemicals and handling paper was beyond my scope as a “amateur photographer”. All different now: I very often do B/Ws of my color pictures and, what is more important, I started to think B/W when taking some pictures.
Hmm, guess that’s it. Not very structured, just some thoughts about the editing and creative process in my particular case. In a nutshell: numbers of pictures increased expontentially, time spent for editing too. On the other hand, now take pictures I wouldn’t have before and by taking more pictures and reviewing them more carefully also improved my own photoskills (I hope).
Wishes,
Guido
PS: your photostream is absolutely stunning!!
So funny you bring this up and have actually calculated the ratio. My own ratio of pictures taken to posted is more like 8%, and I take more pictures in an average 1 hour walk around town (80 or so) than I did during a week at Carnival in Salvador, Brazil in 2001 (30). I’m probably just like you, I shoot with a small point and shoot (usually) so I’m more worried about missing the shot with a blurry pic than I am about having a few extra files on my PC. Digital also encourages me to try some crazy angles, variations on the same theme, games with focusing etc. and it’s a great part of the learning experience, watching the “crazy” shots come up and every once in a while saying WOW. I also have on days and off days, on my off days, I will take 100 photos and stretch to put one up, and on my on days, maybe take 50, put up 5, and have another five that I feel might be interesting to Flickrdom. The worst thing is that I usually forget about those good pictures I took and never get around to posting them up later during a dry spell.
I’ve gotta say that I just love Flickr though. Getting instant recognition, appreciation, learning from others whose photos I admire, and being inspired by the amazing diversity of the styles and viewpoints of other Flickr users is an incredible experience! I could read 5 “how to take better pictures” books or spend an hour on Flickr browsing through great shots and seeing what about each picture other people like and dislike. I feel I get a lot more out of Flickr!
Thank you Guido and Steve for your comments!
Guido ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú thank you for sharing your thoughts. It is interesting to hear about all of your picture taking experiences, and you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve had many wonderful ones all around the world by the looks of it. I was especially interested to hear about your experiences with film as I have very little experience with that medium. For the most part though, it sounds as though going digital has increased the kinds of pictures you take and the number of pictures you share ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú both of which sound (and look) like good things to me. :)
Steve ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú glad to hear that I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not the only one who has played around with these numbers. ;) From what you and others have said, it seems as though digital photography allows for more opportunities for experimentation which is a positive thing. I couldn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t agree with you more about the wonderful world of Flickr. Being part of Flickr these past few months has been an inspiring experience for me as well. Not only is it filled with wonderful pictures, but there are wonderful people behind those pictures who offer encouragement and support.
Hi Amy,
I don’t have the resources in which to graph the number of photos posted vs. taken, but I can say that I most definitely shoot more and post more with digital. I think if I wasn’t shooting digital I wouldn’t even consider being part of Flickr - just too much work. I used to post scanned pictures of mine on my personal site, but that was mostly for friends and family to see.
As I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with digital, I’ve taken more photos, almost exponentially. When I lived in Argentina for 6 weeks in 2003, I shot around 200 images in digital (and maybe 15 rolls of color). When I went to Greece last Spring for 9 days, I took about 800 pictures. My latest trip to Vietnam (2 weeks), I took over 2,000 images.
My problem is editing. I have trouble deciding what should be posted and what shouldn’t. Over time my pictures are improving and I’m discovering more and more images I want to share - besides the obvious “wow” ones. I was looking at some friend’s streams and their total collection averages 700 images. I’m over 2,000 - is that embarassing or what? :o).
Part of the problem is that I’m trying to tell a story with my travel images, so I feel I want to accurately chronicle my life. I know my friends and family visit flickr to learn about my travels, so I don’t skimp there. I’m a lot better than I used to be, where I used to post any decent photo, and 25 at a time. It doesn’t make it easy that access to internet here is so limited and I’d do a lot more photo-ing stuff if I had internet at home after work, but I’m making do.
I think this was a bit of a ramble, but I thought I’d throw in my meanderings anyhow :o).
Hi Michaela - thanks for stopping by. ;) I agree with you that scanning photos is a lot of work - I recently scanned a bunch of photos I took in Guatemala in 2001 which was extremely time consuming and not nearly as rewarding (mostly because the quality was poor ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú unfortunately I took the pics with a low end point and shot). I debated not posting the pictures on Flickr because of the low quality, however, they are part of my life and, like you, I want to be able to chronicle and share my travel experiences as well. So if it means posting a slightly blurry pic or the token tourist shot, then so be it I say. ;)
It sounds as though our digital numbers are pretty similar. I’m off to Peru for 3 weeks at the end of June and I’m currently stocking up on memory cards as I’m sure I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll be taking pictures by the thousands. Although these numbers are large, I think a lot of it has to do with the subject matter. For instance, you and I both seem to like to capture little details and it’s hard not to take pictures when there are soo many of them! ;) What about with your portraits - do you always get the perfect smile the first time or do you usually take a few shots per person?
Heh, I’ve posted some poor scans of some of my favorite images from and they really don’t do my technique (or printing) justice, but they’re part of the creative process I’ve gone through to get to this point :o).
I’m JEALOUS of your Peru trip - that sounds fabulous. Are you shooting with RAW? That always eats up my memory cards like crazy. I’ve resolved to toting a laptop with me to offload. It’s almost full :o). We definitely do both capture so many details of a culture and place, I can’t wait to see what you turn up with!
For people portraits, I try to take multiple shots, but oftentimes I get very uncomfortable and timid after the first few so even some of my best shots of people have usually only been “that” one. I really need to change that policy, I’m sure I’d get a lot more beautiful ones, but for now this is how I temper my nosiness into people’s lives :o).
Unfortunately my camera doesn’t support RAW format. I’d love to shot in RAW to be able really play around with the images in PS, however, it is probably a blessing in terms of space as I can’t see myself lugging a laptop around Peru. I’m really looking forward to taking pictures in Peru of the architecture and who knows, maybe even some people too. ;) I would love to photograph more people but I’ve always felt a bit self-conscious about it. The subjects in your photographs always appear so relaxed and at ease and I’m sure you’d have no problem getting a few more shots out out of them. Although from what I’ve seen of your photostream you really get some gems from the ones that you do take.
Hi Amy and everyone else,
Firstly, great feeling to visit your site, refreshing layout too :)
As to your thoughts on digital work-flows. Think that I was quite frightened by the turn of speed with the creative side of taking shots. As your graph might reflect; the surge of input at certain times of the year is natural, due to light and seasonal preferance.
Thought you have shown a certain consistancy in having uploaded reguarly, unlike me, who has just started at this siite. Yet what about that work-flow, I edit and work alote with PShop, as for me its stil half of the process with this tecnique. I do get frightened at the sheer amount one can take of a subject; almost feels that you can take from the cenerity of the subject itself at times., (one?Ǭ¥s bound to turn out right) and (must move on) can always delete later. In the end you risk missing the moment that counts; to stop and feel - compairing to the mathodic loving process that Alan embrasses with his box-camera.
So in all, I would imagine that Pshop thankfully decreaces my choices in what is used published or thrown. My graph would be very week and low key I guess!
Realy enjoy your work, very similar interests it seems!
Hi Steve - thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. I agree with you that editing not only depends on the tool you are using but also things like the time of year and the feeling of the pictures you are taking.
Just impressed that you have the time to do a graph at allk, given you amazing output.
Yet can imagine some interesting feed-back with it, if including all the other info too; camera settings, subject, time of day for example.