The Shotgun Approach to Getting Images

During some workshops, there are always photographers rapidly firing their shutter for each picture; kind of like a machine gun. I’m certain, in their mind, the reason is to make certain they don’t miss the shot. But, I have to ask, isn’t this a replacement for confidence?

The “old-school” photographers, during the dark days of film (see yesterday’s post for more on this subject), didn’t have the luxury of firing multiple shots for each image, unless they were at a sporting or action event and had a motor drive on their camera. There, with the subject moving so rapidly, multiple images were a necessity, not the norm.

Film was finite; only a fixed number of exposures were possible before the film needed changing. And don’t forget the cost. Compared with digital, film was (and still is) expensive. You couldn’t just fill up a memory card with hundreds, if not thousands, of images, or delete unwanted images before the end of an event.

There was something important about each image, knowing the restrictions of film. A photographer was always careful about setting the proper ISO (ex-ASA), choosing the aperture and shutter speed and carefully focusing for the proper hyperfocal distance. If you were using a medium format or large format camera, this was a given—especially with large format. 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras used sheet film which needed to be loaded prior to the event, in holders, for later manual insertion, one-by-one, into the camera.

The act of pressing the shutter was a deliberate act done only after considering all of the variables—including, at times, wetting your finger and holding it up to measure wind direction and speed (slow shutter for maximum depth of field).

Today, with most cameras able to take multiple images, as long as the shutter remains depressed, is a substitution for careful consideration of the act of photography, hence the shotgun approach, where one hopes that by acquiring multiple, rapid shots of the subject, one will be a keeper.

Relying on the machine-gunning approach to photography can deprive one of the training necessary to capture the decisive moment. There is a feeling, sometimes more than an intellectual determination, of the decisive moment and, it seems, for the trained photographer, the shutter is automatic. This feeling can only be acquired by practice. Ask yourself, the next time you shoot, what is it I’m capturing and does the image through the viewfinder match the image in my mind. If so, that’s the decisive moment. Rapid fire shooting does not develop this skill, only delays the development of the true photographer.

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