Filling a media card to find images

- Here at The Practicing Photographer we don't like to give you a lot of rules. I personally don't believe that it's a good idea to learn a strict method for doing something. It's better to understand how things work so you can solve your own problems but today I'm going to give you not a rule but a really good practice to get into, a habit that you should start working immediately on to try and build. This is going to sound simple and it's going to maybe sound a little weird but I think you're going to see why this is a good practice for a practicing photographer.

When you go out, this is all it is, when you go out, fill your card. That's it, I mean, the media card in your camera, just fill it. Alright, maybe not fill it because currently right now I have a card in my camera and shooting in raw mode it says I have 1,139 images remaining, so I'm not going to be able to fill this card but I'm going to aim for as many pictures as I can. I'm here right now in an industrial park in central Oklahoma. Not to cause any offense to the people who may work around here but this is not a particularly photogenic place but I'm going to go wander around now and I'm going to shoot some pictures.

I'm going to aim to fill my card. I don't think I'm going to come back in the 20 minutes or so that I've got with 1,100 pictures but I'm going to aim for 100s. I want as many pictures as I can possibly get. Now, you may think that I'm advocating the idea that quantity equals quality and it doesn't but what quantity equals is good photographic practice and a defeat of the editor that sits in your head. I think you'll understand more what I mean as I get going. There are a lot of reasons that you might be attracted to a particular scene.

Maybe you see you a play of light, maybe you see a play of geometry, maybe you see a subject matter that's actually just interesting. One of the difficult things is to learn to tune in to those impulses, that draw to a subject may be very faint and very hard to hear. With this exercise I'm listening to every tiny little impulse that I may have. If something even remotely catches my eye, I'm stopping and taking a picture of it. That to me is why this exercise works well for me.

It makes me tune into my visual sense in a way that I'm usually honestly too lazy to do. This is great, the only way I can think of to get this thing in focus is to burst while pushing through the area. That just picked me up like 30 pictures, this is great. I don't want to call it an exercise but this something that you should do all time but laziness is not the only thing that this prevents. It also is a check against fear 'cause we all have that when we're out shooting.

We're afraid of going home with bad images and so, we don't shoot an image sometimes because we're afraid it might be bad. That's the editor talking again but with this I'm shooting and shooting and shooting to get quantity. I am taking pictures of things that I normally wouldn't take pictures of because I would be afraid they were a stupid photograph. They might very well be a stupid photograph but there are other things to gain from them as we'll see in a little bit. No, quantity does not necessarily lead to great images but I am after several things here. If I get a good image, that's great, but I'm thinking that I'm also going to learn a lot of things that are going to help me when I'm perhaps in a situation where great images aren't so hard to find.

The only way to know for sure is to head back now and look at the pictures. I'm waiting for my images to import right now. They're coming into Lightroom. Something I've mentioned before here on The Practicing Photographer is that it can be difficult as a photographer to practice. Other disciplines, whether you're any kind of visual artist or performance artist or whatever, you get the chance to go in a room and know that you're practicing. We don't get that because every image that our camera produces could possibly be a great final image and that means that we never get to just relieve ourselves of that pressure to do great work and go out and simply practice things, practice seeing, practice new photographic ideas.

Obviously there's nothing stopping you from doing that, it's just hard to do that naturally. This exercise brings that in kind of through the backdoor in a way that you're maybe not intentionally doing and I think it's really valuable for that reason. I took a quick look before I started importing just at the count. I shot 155 images in about an hour. Now, I mentioned earlier that I had room on the card for 1,000, so I was off by a factor of 10 but I still feel pretty good about this because rarely in San Francisco where I live when I'm walking around, do I get 155 images in an hour.

This made me shoot a lot more. You're not going to get to see them right now. I'm going to wait til next week to show them to you and then I'm going to show you both the images that came straight out the camera and my edits of them so you can see what I was visualizing as I went. Don't wait til next week to try this. This is more than just an exercise, this is a practice you should engage in any time you take your camera outside.