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You shouldn’t overshoot. It’s like over-eating, over-drinking.

This was from a “lost” (until recently) interview done with Henri Cartier-Bresson back in 1971. C-B’s explanation was that “over is too much, because by the time you press, you arm the shutter once more, and maybe the picture was in between”.

He basically said that photographers should spend more time “seeing” than shooting…and I wholly agree with that. I think his explanation for “why” may substitute a practical reason for a more insightful one.

I believe part of being a photographer is developing a critical eye. A “critical eye” means an effective mental mechanism for knowing when a good or interesting photo opportunity is present. Such a “critical eye” is developed through experience…the experience of having taken both effective and ineffective photos, and learning what elements or factors were present that led to the effective ones.

I think there’s a worse repercussion from indiscriminately taking photos than not being ready to take the “good” photos: it’s disconnecting the process of taking/making photographs from intentional or calculated seeing.

When critical seeing and the act of making photos get disconnected, you get a flood of mediocre and/or “garbage” photographs. And having lots of mediocre or garbage photos around you tends to “dilute” your critical eye and torpedo your self-confidence as a photographer (e.g, you may start thinking you don’t have “it” anymore–that you’re “washed up” and so forth). You end up with a diluted eye.

There are two important parts to effective photography:

  1. developing and maintaining a “critical eye”
  2. securely connecting this “eye” to the act of taking and then (later) editing your photos

Typically, photographic magic doesn’t just happen, you have to make it happen.

People can get lucky taking thousands of photos and ending up with a few winners. But making photographic success into a numbers game doesn’t reward skill; it rewards sheer physical effort and expensive equipment that can acquire a huge number of frames/sec. It’s no wonder that people sometimes credit a photographer’s success with the quality and price tag on the equipment s/he owns.

Critical seeing is a reward in and of itself because it’s a recognition of something good happening, whether you happen to have a camera to capture it or not.

Connect this recognition with the act of photographing, and you’ve got a partially controllable and rewarding means for communicating ideas and perceptions as a skillful and able Photographer.



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