Conservation, Patience, and Planning Ahead

With only 24 frames at your disposal, you must think before clicking the shutter as every frame counts. You can’t just run around shooting on burst mode until you get a good photo. Every image, every photo has to have a reason. Thus conservation. The medium does not allow for 1,000 photos of a flower just to get 1 right. No you had to get it right the first time. There is a finite number of photographs you can take before you get it right.

This leads us to being patient. If every shot has to count, you need to wait till the lighting is just right, the moment is genuine, the emotions are raw before you take that photograph. Seasoned professionals will tromp around in the wild for days without taking a single photograph, waiting for hours for a lion to show up at a watering hole or the sun to set as a herd of elephants saunters past. They know that the true nature of photography requires an immense amount of patience. Burst mode won’t help them if the conditions are not correct in the first place. No amount of post will turn a mediocre photograph into a great photograph.

Finally planning ahead. If all you have are 24 frames to get the correct image, you will do everything in your power to plan for every contingency in order to get the image you want. You will know aperture, iso, shutter speed like the back of your hand and can easily adjust for varying conditions. Rather than blindly adjusting settings for 100 photos and one of them happens to turn out, you carefully set your settings and composition to get the image you desire.

Film taught me how to get it right the first time. I came back from a year abroad with maybe 800 photos? That is less than 3 a day for an entire year spent traveling with no more than a couple weeks stationary. Other people that I know who have traveled that long have thousands of photos. They will take a thousand photos just for a week long trip. Then when they come home they have to sort through hundreds of photos of the exact same location, just to find the one they like. How can you enjoy the trip if all you are taking is photographs in the hope that one turns out? Yes memory is super cheap and virtually unlimited but this does not help your skill as a photographer.

I am not saying digital doesn't have its benefits. It definitely does, but at what cost? I see my friends running off into the world digital cameras in hand and coming back with 10 photos of every subject. They just keep clicking away until they get it right. Instead of standing there, looking at the subject, carefully positioning their cameras and settings, waiting for the right moment in the light, and then pressing down on that shutter button.

Being a photographer is much more than taking a thousand photos in the hopes of getting one right and then spending hours and hours retouching every second of the photograph to make it perfect. To be a photographer is knowing what to do under most circumstances and being able to sit there patiently waiting until the right moment creeps up on you and then click. One perfect moment frozen in time.