I know you’re pretending to be dense on purpose, but taking a dozen pictures at once and automatically picking the best one can obviously save a lot of shots. Same with combining exposures.
I have also struggled with getting great shots until I learned how many tricks are commonly used like feeding animals, cooling down insects so they don't move or shooting in a confined areas. It makes me feel a little better that rarely get any good shots without using these tricks.
>> I shoot a ton but 95% of it never makes it past import
If you've got a computer friendly game controller, one neat way to speed up your culling is to use some key mapping software (Joy2Key on Windows, Joystick Mapper on Mac) to make the controller's buttons map to rating or mark for deletion commands for LR/Aperture/Other. You can then sit back and zip through your shots very quickly.
Woah, that's impressive. I've started taking ~7 burst shots with my iPhone instead of just one. The first and last 3 are usually a little noisy or blurry, but the middle one is usually gold. I might try this method too. Thanks!
1. Put your camera on continuous shoot. My Canon 20D could do 3 frames/second. My 7D can do 7 frames/second.
2. Make sure your shutter speed maxes out at 1/10th of a second or so. Blurry pics are totally fine. Try to keep it landscape, though. Fixing the portrait shots is a pain.
3. Hold down your shutter button a lot. Turn on AF and give your camera to other people and tell them to do the same.
4. Download your 5000+ pictures to your computer later.
5. Open up VirtualDub, and load in all the JPEGs, tell it to resize to 1/4, and set the framerate to 10 frames/second or so.
6. Layer over with some music. I recommend sorting by duration in iTunes to find something that is as long as your video.
If you take a workshop or two, you'll better understand the thought process of a photographer, leading you to start taking descent photos within 1000 snaps.
I agree with the need to edit for improvement - meditating on your composition and lighting will ingrain better camera habits for the next round of snaps.
Personally, taking analog photos with an exposure meter taught me about good exposure. Measuring exposure takes time, but it's a great learning process.
A similar mindset can be achieved by only shooting in Manual mode on a DLSR ( and no cheating with Auto-ISO ).
After a while you can pre-guess the exposure settings for a particular shot before even looking through the viewfinder, but point the camera a few degrees to the side and you have to reset your exposure for the new lighting.
It's frustrating for the first few years and initially you'll miss many shots but when you nail The Shot you feel that you really 'own' it because everything leading to it was your decision.
Eventually it becomes second-nature and you'll be spinning the settings dials without conscious effort.
Yea, taking a few photos really doesn’t take very long. ‘Loosing’ 3-5 minutes of a 3 day ski trip really isn’t much of a sacrifice.
Video is tricky. I find simply aiming in the right general direction without looking in the viewfinder means you get crappy video and can still stay in the moment. Then when watching it you kick of the actual memory even if the video isn’t that good.
>I do this by putting on dark filters known as ND or Neutral Density filters that trick the camera into thinking it’s night time forcing a longer shutter speed.
Author is knowledgeable enough about filters but can't figure out manual mode on his camera?
The trick from the analog photography era seems easier: take many shots with very low exposure on the same image frame from a fixed viewpoint. Over time, the things that are static make a stronger imprint on the film, whereas the moving things are too volatile to get recorded (in more than one shot). No need for averaging a stack of digital images in Photoshop...
It is, but that approach is a way of avoiding developing skill in photography, and instead putting effort into being a better editor.
I don't shoot rapid-fire except when I'm shooting motion.
The most skilled photographers generally don't shoot that many frames. An example is when I'm using my 4x5; it takes 15 minutes to get the framing and focus exactly right, and it costs a couple of dollars to get each $2 sheet of film processed. You can bet that I'm very careful with my shots!
I would not be surprised to the photogs revolting by just running everything in full auto. Frame it, and shoot it. No more thinking after the framing decisions. Nice and easy, give me my cheesy.
I've almost completely given up on 35mm, going with the Hasselblad or the Fuji 690 most of the time. Or my 4x5, in which case I'm feeling lucky if I get 3 or 4 shots done in a day. I do have a digital camera, and even with that, I still can't get past the habit of only shooting when I like what I see. I don't understand at all the urge to take huge numbers of shots and sort them out later, when I can do it in my head before I press the shutter.
In his case, motion blur given live subjects would be a common problem, resulting in trashing two-thirds of the photos. With a modern camera and sensitive file or sensors, you can shoot at much faster shutter speeds for the same amount of light. On a given shoot, I may take 250-500 shots of which, unless I screw up, almost all are technically fine (correct exposure and focus) but only a handful turn out to be keepers for aesthetic reasons. But then, I shoot mostly landscapes which tend not to move around too much.
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