It's The Print
I can live without 20 frames per second
I've said this here before, but it bears repeating. If you print your artwork it will no doubt make you a better photographer.
I just returned from leading a photo trip in Patagonia. It was a grueling experience, with sustained winds every day that in several cases exceeded gale force and in two cases hit gusts of hurricane force (one of which toppled my tripod and broke my camera).
Yet Patagonia is truly something special; spectacular landscapes, diverse animal and plant life, good food (in some places) and wonderful, helpful people.
I captured many more images than I intended. That was due to the fact that I was testing a new technique to capture wildlife with my Fujifilm GFX 100 and 50S medium format cameras (I am glad I took the 50S as a backup). It took quite a bit of practice for me to get reasonably comfortable with it and I'm committed to continued practice. But with a maximum frame rate of 5/second, I'll thankfully never come home laden with the tens of thousands of images my colleagues typically do. I do have a life other than photography to spend my time on other than culling and post-processing.
So aside from shooting wildlife, I mainly focused on shooting landscapes, extractions, and compositional elements, which are my mainstays.
So how do prints fit into this picture? On this trip I was ever more conscious of thinking to myself, "Will this possibly make a wonderful print?" If the answer was no, I stood down or looked elsewhere. I'm not saying that I didn't succumb every so often to a scene I shoudn't have recorded. But, by and large, I stayed on track.
When I faced yet another spectacular scene, my first thought was, black and white or color? In most cases I chose B&W. The power of B&W with Patagonia's clouds, mountains and weather was obvious. Still, the sunrises were extremely inviting, so I caved to color.
My point here is to encourage you to slow down. No need to take 100 images of a scene. A few are usually enough if you think in terms of the final output, namely the fine art print.
I've been working my way through Bruce Barnbaum's book The Essence of Photography and he exhorts us to slow down and take our time. As you probably know, he still shoot his black and white with a 4x5 camera. I agree with not needing 20fps with landscapes, however, I shoot a lot of high school and some college sports and while I bring home an awful lot of images from a ballgame, I feel that the this is where the newer, faster frames per second really pays off. I know many of the "old time" sports photographers didn't have the speed of today's cameras, it's made getting better shots easier. As always, I enjoy your posts.
Really good lesson in this post. Along with a buddy of mine, I have an exhibit opening in August of some of my desert photography (I am a Florida-based photographer and fell in love with the SW deserts only a few years ago). So that same buddy and I took a trip in April to Tucson to photography Saguaro National Park. That trip was the first time that I: a) took my GFX 100s and GFX 50sii and b) begin to look at potential compositions from the "will this make a good print" perspective. It certainly made for fewer images in total - and even fewer "keepers" - but I actually enjoyed the slowing down of this approach.