I’m not sure precisely when I crossed 100,000 photos, but I’m well past that mark now. In another few weeks, my Lightroom catalog will hit 200,000. Even these might be rookie numbers if you’re a sports or wildlife photographer, or if you’ve been doing wedding photography for a while.
Yet, from my mass of images, I’ve displayed less than 5% on Photography Life over the last ten years. Not even 0.1% made it into my portfolio – meaning that I’d be lucky to take one photo in a thousand that’s actually worth printing. (Plus, I usually photograph slow-paced landscapes; when I do wildlife photography, my keeper rate is much, much lower.)
I’ve always thought about photography as a bit of a numbers game, and those stats are why. If you get a winner every thousand photos or so, it seems like a good idea to take a few thousand photos!
But my opinion has changed some since I started shooting large format film for my personal photography. And don’t worry, this article isn’t really about film photography, but I mention it because it’s why I started approaching this question a little differently. In the few years since I started using large format film, I’ve only taken a couple hundred photos with it. This total even includes a number of early photos – not quite practice photos, but it hurts less to think of them that way – where I made some fundamental error like loading the sheet backwards or taking out the dark slide at the wrong time, ruining the shot.
Even so, at least thirty of these large format photographs have become part of my portfolio. That’s a rate of more than 10% – over 100 times better than what I get on digital. I’m not the type who sees film as superior to digital photography, even though I enjoy using it, so what’s with these results? Is photography not actually a numbers game?
Maybe you’re wondering if the question even matters in the first place. Who cares if photography is a numbers game so long as you get some good photos? But I think that it matters quite a bit.
If photography is essentially random (i.e. a numbers game) then you could predict that you’ll get one great photo for every X number of photos that you take (assuming the most basic of guidelines, like varying the subjects and lighting conditions). Conversely, if photography is mostly non-random, then the main way to get better photos would be by improving your skills, even if you took far fewer shots.
My time with large format film photography has shown me that it’s closer to the latter. If I’m being selective about when I trip the shutter – which is necessary given the cost of 4×5 film, let alone 8×10 and larger – just 20 sheets of film is sufficient for a week of landscape photography. Even so, I’ll end up capturing about as many total portfolio images as I would have gotten on digital.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad approach to take a higher volume of images when you can. As you take more photos, you can pin down the optimal composition or give yourself more options in the culling stage. I’ve talked about this before in my article on the refining process, and more recently in my article on choosing between similar versions of a photo. In this sense, it’s perfectly fine to take a lot more photos if that’s the approach that gives you the best results. (And with some genres like wildlife photography, it may even be necessary.)
Yet, a lot of the work that goes into a good photo can be done without taking bad photos along the way. Maybe you do need to shoot at 30 FPS to capture a bird’s wings at the right spot, but ask yourself, is this particular bird the one you should be photographing? Is your camera position optimal to justify taking that many photos? Do the light and the background work well for the subject? Or will you just end up with a burst of a hundred photos that you never look at again?
If you take a moment to honestly evaluate the light, subject, and composition, you can “delete” a lot of photos by never taking them in the first place, and focus your attention on finding better subjects. This turns photography away from being random chance into something more deliberate and creative.
So, if you ask me whether photography is a numbers game – where taking good photos mainly depends upon how many you take – my answer is no. You might get lucky every once in a while, but more often, good photos are the result of putting care into your work rather than spraying and praying. Even in a genre like wildlife photography, I’d bet on a skilled professional who’s limited to ten photos in a day over a layman who’s allowed to take a thousand.
But there’s a caveat. Photography is still a numbers game in a very important way: how often you go out to take photos in the first place.
It doesn’t need to be anywhere special, although of course that can help. But no matter where you are, simply going out more often with your camera means that you’ll see more things to photograph, you’ll stumble upon more interesting moments, and you’ll exercise your creative and technical skills for when it really matters.
That’s why I say that photography is not a numbers game in terms of how many photos you take. But it is a numbers game in terms of how often you go take pictures. If you really want to improve, go out more often, no matter where you are. That’s all there is to it – even (perhaps especially) if you don’t take very many photos each time.