Many people when choosing between film and digital photography come to the question of how much each picture is worth. When doing digital photography, you can always take a few more shots to make sure that you get a perfect image. For example, when shooting with a flash you need a few extra takes. In film photography, of course, everything is different. For example, it’s kind of expensive to spend all of your 36 shots on one film role to create one decent image. so it might be quite valuable for learning photography, because every time you take a picture, you have to think of your shot and whether it’s worth it or not. It puts you in this state of mind when you start to choose more carefully the compositions and light. But let’s look closer at this topic and decide wherever it’s better to have a film camera or a digital one. And is this better to take fewer photos or more in your photography career?
Choosing the images is as important as taking them.
I talked a lot about the visual library and mentioned it in many of my blog posts. This is a way to basically learn art and photography without taking a single picture. Just by observing the works of others. And I know there were a few projects when people were just collecting old images and selecting them in a new way, creating whole art projects out of this.
So of course, when we create hundreds of images every month on our digital cameras, we don’t need to choose all of them. It’s better to keep only the best. In taking that in mind, we come to a question. Do we need to take all of these hundreds of photographs, or is it better to take a few but better ones?
I have designed a few photo books. These were my personal projects and the way to track my progress in photography. And every year we designed a new photo book, and each photo book had fewer and fewer images. Every photo book was more and more stylised.
Film photography. When you take fewer photos.
For sure, when we talk about film photography, it might be a bit costly to take many pictures at once. It is also a nice experience when you put a roll of film in your camera and have a long walk with it and when you wait for getting your pictures out. What film photography taught me is that not everything I see is necessary and needed to be photographed. The whole approach of how I take images when I keep a film camera in my hands is different.
For the majority of the time, I have been doing digital photography and then I came to exactly the same result, I started taking fewer and fewer images over the years. This all is connected to the visual library too, this is all about your taste.
And if you want to hear my opinion: Yes, I think it is really important to have this thought process when you take pictures to actually choose your compositions and really care about the light and your subject. This is really the way to learn and the way to improve. But what you need to take in mind is that also to improve you have to continue taking pictures. Your camera shouldn’t stop you from doing that. And since film photography became three times more expensive in the last couple of years it makes a big difference. When saying that you can take fewer images, I don’t mean a single image per month.
Digital photography and when you can take as many photos as you like.
When doing digital photography, you have the freedom to always look at the images you have taken and retake any shot you want. And yes, many people end up taking thousands of pictures. But I don’t think anything is wrong with it.
There is a famous quote about that:
Your first 10,000 photos are your worst
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I probably have taken not 10,000 but about 30 thousand photographs that I have edited and retouched. I started to notice that many times I went out on the streets to have a walk and took my camera with me and ended up taking only one or two images within the entire walk. Sometimes I could go on a trip and take only 10-25 images within a week. But when it comes to creating a photography project, I can take 500 images within a couple of hours. And this is the advantage of digital photography when you have the power to create a perfect shot.
Do not choose a camera with which you will take fewer photos.
In 2020 and in 2021 my wife was doing only film photography and because each shot is valuable it made her take fewer photos. We realised that to progress she needs to take more images and she needs to have the ability to have the camera with her all the time. Photography always had a purpose, and one of them is to express ourselves. And the way for her to unleash her creativity and try new things was to get a digital camera.
So we bought Ricoh GRIIIX since this is a truly pocketable camera that is a game changer. I would also replace my Sony A7R if I don’t need it for work.
Since then we have created so many great images with this camera. Sometimes we could experiment a lot and let ourselves take these extra 10 or 20 images of the same subject. And I think when it comes to the learning process, this is very important.
So when choosing to take fewer photos or more I would go for more
So if you’re in the process of learning photography. I would recommend getting yourself into this endless flow of work. Try to get inspired as much as you can. Try to be as creative as you can. Take any subject you can find This can be anything from your household goods to some tree in a park. And try to photograph it with 20 different techniques and angles as well as in different lighting conditions. That way you will have to think even more when you do film photography for example.
I believe that also the ability to take more images may power up your creative thinking. And I also believe that creative thinking is vital for your photography. I never offer to take 10 pictures from the same angle. By offering you to experiment, I mean trying out completely different techniques. You can still try to take fewer images, but fewer of pointless ones. And when it comes to taking 100 images of one tree, you can be as creative as possible. This is the way of divergent thinking. And on the other side when you limit yourself to one image per day you’re thinking more convergently, hence limiting yourself.
Thank you very much for reading till the end!
I hope this can help you to learn photography faster. And if you haven’t done that already, check out one of my most important blog posts:
Top 10 Ways To Improve Photography Skills. Learn Photography Faster
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