Quantity Over Quality

The ballad of spraying and praying

I continue to encounter strange things on social media. No, I’m not specifically referring to thirst-trap rage bait or crypto scams, but something far more insidious. It seems that some photographers are, unfortunately, doing it all wrong.¹

I’ve found myself entangled in weird debates about everything from the pros and cons of free work (long story), to whether or not photographers should turn over raw files (maybe), to the ins and outs of pricing photography (I was accused of being “old school” for suggesting we get paid more for doing more work. “Photography just progresses,” they informed me. Where’s my giant eye roll emoji when I need it?)

This expressionless face—my most used emoji—will have to do.

But the weirdest conversation I’ve stumbled into lately involved the quantity of pictures a photographer should shoot on a given assignment. Apparently, some of us are of the opinion that shooting a large number of images is a good thing. The more the better, in fact. Something to be bragged about, even.

It’s not quality these photographers are after, but quantity.

These folks would say that they are in fact after quality, but they leverage quantity to get there. It makes sense in theory. If you take more pictures you’ll get more good ones, right? That’s true to a point — beyond which every extra frame brings diminishing returns.

There’s a name for taking way too many pictures. It’s called overshooting, and it’s different from simply being thorough. In fact I would argue it is actually harming your work and doing a disservice to your clients (if you are fortunate enough to have clients, that is). Most people would rather make 10 great photographs than 100 acceptable ones. My evidence? Nobody ever says “Cartier-Bresson was amazing because look how many pictures he took.”

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Most of us don’t believe overshooting is a good idea. In fact, some of us get really mad about it.

I saw a post on Threads that confessed to a preposterous amount of overshooting.

“I am the worst overshooter,” the photographer wrote. “At the last wedding I did, which lasted roughly six hours, I took 23,000 images. Culling alone literally took me two whole days. 🤡”

I did the math. 23,000 images in six hours is 3,833 shots per hour. That’s one frame every .939 seconds. Which I hope is not because she pressed the button once every .939 seconds but rather a couple times each minute she shot a few dozen frames at a super-fast rate.²

The poster went on to clarify that it was actually the first wedding she’d ever shot and she was pretty nervous. “Any other shoot I usually take about 1,000 images per hour,” she wrote. “But that day I went crazy. Oopsies.”

Oopsies?

Reader, when I tell you she was absolutely roasted in the comments… I mean charred to a crisp.

I’m not trying to throw her under the bus but, frankly, I am astonished. I’m generally pretty laissez faire about process (whatever works for you, right?) however some things do strike me as truly problematic, and this is one. It’s the very definition of “spray and pray.” How can you possibly make deliberate, considered choices when you’re firing off 1,000 shots an hour — much less four times that number?

Frame number 164 on a shoot that totalled 433 images in…

The other side of the argument is, if it works then what’s the problem? Fair enough.

Are we oldheads somehow better skilled because we learned to make 36 frames last an hour?³ I am having a hard time not judging it, because it seems so excessive. But am I just out of touch with a new way of thinking?

I know it’s not ye olden days any more. We have the ability to shoot without the limitations of film, so why limit ourselves?

In the first draft of this piece, it was here that I wrote about what this photographer and her counterparts could do to improve. Because I believe one of the best things we can do to be better photographers is to slow down and be more deliberate. And while I certainly believe that’s true, you should do what I say, not what I do. Because I’m an overshooter too.

The image above — made during a one hour documentary session within a larger, day-long shoot — is frame number 164 out of a total of 433 images. Four hundred and thirty three images in an hour isn’t exactly Carleton Watkins. It’s a button press every 8.3 seconds. Who am I to throw shade at my fellow overshooters? It’s an easy trap to fall into.

Something something let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Slow and steady should win the race, generally speaking. Are we able to be deliberate and make good choices when we’re shooting a frame every second, or even every eight seconds? Would my take have been better if I’d shot a frame every 15 seconds, half as many, only 200-some in an hour? It seems much more reasonable, that’s for sure.

I believe anyone super-aggressive on the shutter release is doing themselves a disservice. Not only are we making exponentially more work for ourselves on the back end, in extreme cases we are likely hindering our development. Most things, from basketball to basketweaving, work better when done deliberately. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Aside from working so fast that it becomes difficult to adjust on the fly, when you shoot everything in sight you’re not being selective. And I would argue that a photographer's primary task, shared across disciplines and by all manner of photographers, is selection. At what should you point the camera? What should be included in the frame? What must be kept out? Photography is selection.

That’s it. That’s kind of the whole gig. Point the camera at the thing or don’t. Include the other thing in the frame or don’t. We can’t keep everything. It’s just fundamentally not how it works.

Large format photographers will tell you this is one of the best things about working with sheet film. Especially when you’re inexperienced, view cameras are slow and cumbersome. Each frame costs a few bucks, and more than that to process. When you’ve got $15 riding on every exposure, you start to become very selective about when to push the button.

Doing this, I believe, is an ideal way to improve. We will learn to see better, to pre-visualize, and ultimately to refine our taste. Which, I contend, is what makes each of us unique.

The good news is we don’t need a view camera or sheet film to slow down. We can set our own limits—don’t shoot more than one frame per minute, for instance—and challenge ourselves to really work a scene before releasing the shutter. Or use film. Put a roll in your pocket and one in the camera and limit yourself to 72 frames for the day. (Half-frame cameras are cheating!)

I believe that I perform better with limitations, even arbitrary ones. It could be a client’s guidelines—horizontal format, low-contrast, natural light only, whatever—or my own self-imposed restrictions. And I’m not alone. There is a line of thinking that says such creative limitations are essential for producing good work. And when challenges don’t occur naturally, we have to put them on ourselves to narrow the possibilities—to focus our vision and, ultimately, become more selective in our work.

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1. The very definition of irony.

2. But honestly, I can’t wrap my head around this. At 63 frames per minute, and her camera shooting 20fps, she’d have to hold down the shutter release for a full second three times a minute. That’s still weird, right?

3. That was, in fact, how I would estimate how much film I’d shoot at an event back at the beginning of my career: one roll per hour.