I was recently at a photography group meetup, which are often good opportunities to meet new friends and old, network and learn from each other, and grab some fun portfolio images. I also use them for experimental tests, like I did with the Phoenix Harman 200 recently. This particular shoot was a really fun mix of photographers, shooting 35mm, medium format film, digital DSLR and mirrorless, and even a drone flying around grabbing BTS video. What struck me, particularly as I was using the Nikon FG, was the extremely rapid shutter sounds coming from so many of the digital shooters.
 

"Your camera work is immaculate my man" - Ajani

It's not unusual for me to grab shots like this, with Ajani, in a single take, yet many of the digital shooters were firing off well over 20fps, whereas I was getting a shot every few seconds at best, using the motor winder. I asked one guy what his frames per second was and he replied "I don't know." Now, there is absolutely a time and a place for this kind of "spray and pray" approach to photography, but it's more appropriate to sports or nature shots, where the difference between frames even a hundredth of a second apart can be meaningful. I just found it amusing to see it happening during what was effectively a portrait or fashion shoot. I posted a series of headshots on Instagram and Facebook today with another model Greshawna, and I realized that of the four images I had captured, each of them was a good portrait in its own right, each was distinct, and there weren't any that I would reject out of hand.

"Thankyou for capturing these beautiful photos of me" - Greshawna

Now, I'm not saying that I typically get a 100% "keeper rate" with my photography, but I do find that I average around 70%, with the others being things like missed focus or blinking eyes, or some other imperfection I wouldn't like. I generally know at the moment I press the shutter that I have a great picture, and I generally don't press the shutter until I know.

Obviously I have a pressure to be more frugal with film than digital, each image does effectively cost me about 50cents to shoot after all, but I have found that even when shooting digital my approach is the same. People have said that "film slows you down", and while it's true that processes like manual metering and manual focus do enforce a more methodical approach, what I think is really happening is that film photographers tend to shoot with greater intention. I know that I watch my backgrounds, how shadows lie, is my horizon correct, how are hands, eyes, and lips looking, and is this image through the viewfinder what I intend to capture or not. I don't have the luxury with film of shooting off 20 or 30 different versions of the same image then finding the best one afterwards, but even when I do have an empty SD card and a full battery, I use my digital camera the same way. I tend to anticipate people's movements and expressions, and if necessary have them redo a specific pose, scene, or movement.

This process of shooting with intention has one immediate and two downstream effects - in the moment it means that I can be confident that I've got the shot(s) I want and then move on, and downstream this makes my editing and image selection so much easier. It's well established that people get overwhelmed with choosing between too many similar images (both photographers and clients!), so having fewer images makes image selection and culling much easier. Secondly, even with batch-edits for things like color grading, having to retouch fewer images is much less work (I do even less work by frankly not doing any retouching at all unless it's for blemish removal). I simply can't imagine coming home with literally thousands of photos from a meetup like that and having to sort through them for the best ones to share - because there's no way they're using more than a handful from each scene/pose anyway.

Being intentional with my photography means that I also have to be disciplined - if a pose or setting doesn't work for me, I don't take the shot and I move on. Sometimes I try and fail - what I think is a great shot really isn't when I get a proper look at it - but that's all part of the 30% failure rate, and failure is how we learn after all. I worry that when dealing with hundreds of images captured without thought, photographers are still able to pick out one or two great shots, and some of them learn only that spraying and praying is a method that will net them great shots. I would argue that shooting with intention will not only net them similar numbers of great shots, it may even net them better images overall, and make their results far easier to work with.

Perhaps the value of a photographer shouldn't be measured by how many photos they take, but by how many photos they need to take.