Are We Shooting Too Much?
Good morning my friends, and happy Tuesday.
First of all, thank you. Really.
To those who have been here for a while, and to the new people who decided to subscribe and receive these thoughts in their inbox. It means a lot.
Can you feel spring coming?
We’re in March now, days are longer and at least here in Italy I can already smell it in the air. That “good season” feeling. The one that makes you want to go out and create something. Let’s hope it’s really that good.
In the past days I’ve been thinking about something.
At the end of last year I told myself I wanted to be more intentional with my photography. To think more about what I actually want to create. To shoot more, yes, but not just randomly. Less “let’s set up something and see what happens”.
And while thinking about this, I realized something slightly uncomfortable.
I have a massive amount of images saved everywhere. Cloud. Local disks. Backups. You name it.
Images I haven’t opened in years.
So I asked myself: what’s the point of producing new photos if after one, two, three months they just get parked on a drive and basically disappear?
It’s like buying a new toy. At the beginning you’re excited. Then something new arrives. And the previous one goes in a box.
Does this happen to you too?
Do you keep creating, accumulating, producing… and then rarely go back?
In my case there is one exception: my monthly Unpublished posts. That’s when I actually dig into the archives and find images I almost forgot I shot. And sometimes it’s a nice surprise.
But apart from that?
I almost never sit down and say, “Let’s see what I was doing five years ago.”
Everything is still there. But kind of… silent.
It’s different from holiday photos. A printed album you can take out, show to family, tell stories. It has a natural moment to exist again.
With the portraits I shoot, it doesn’t really work like that. I can’t just pull out a set from six years ago during dinner and say “Hey, look at this.” It’s not that kind of sharing.
So I end up with gigabytes of images just sitting there.
This doesn’t mean I want to stop creating new ones. Of course not.
But I’m wondering if there’s a better way to give meaning also to what I already created.
If you shoot on commission it’s different. There’s a job, a delivery, the end. Closed. Done.
But when you shoot for yourself, for passion, for research… the risk is to just fill storage space with pieces of your past that slowly fade away.
Anyway.
This is my little early-spring dilemma.
If you’re a portrait photographer — or just a creative person — I’m curious: have you ever felt this?
Let me know.
See you next Tuesday.
Take care and talk soon!
Hey Teo,
I've come to see that the process of photographing is more important to some than the photographs they derive. A possible rationale for gear acquisition syndrome. So filling up one's hard drive with digital image files may be a sign of accomplishment in that regard.
I don't necessarily think photographers shoot too much, maybe they don't cull enough.
I worked as a digital asset manager, cataloging image files for an agency. That informed me how to better catalog and retrieve my own photographs, it also made me think even more the value of every photograph I've taken.
The pandemic helped me work though my archive faster due to having more time to do it.
I take a look through the archive on a daily basis. Finding images I've not culled yet. That number of photographs that aren't culled is dwindling.
Cheers!
Photographing too much........does not compute....!!