Does Quantity Beget Quality?

First off, I want to thank everyone for their positive energy. Whether you commented, sent an email, or simply took a moment to engage the power of prayer and/or positive thoughts on behalf of my brother, Steven, I thank you and so does Steve.

Just yesterday, Steven read all the comments and was truly moved and heartened by what he read. Interestingly, it was the first time my brother had visited this site. He is still on the intravenous antibiotic regimen and it still looks like his surgery will take place early next week.

Anyway... Back to pretty girl shooting.

Does quantity beget quality? I'm talking, of course, about the number of images a photographer captures in hopes of getting *THE* shot(s).

In a recent article in Digital Photo Pro magazine, long-time National Geographic photographer, Jim Richardson, says he may snap 20,000 to 40,000 images for a given assignment in hopes of capturing a very small number of amazing photos. Generally, Richardson's assignments take 8 to 12 weeks to shoot. And that includes a lot of time spent doing things other than capturing those twenty to forty-thousand pictures. He admits that only about 20% of that time is spent with cameras in his hands. The rest of it is spent on logistics-- planning, coordinating, researching, and more. But still, that's a whole lot of images to edit!

Obviously, as it pertains to glamour photography, I'm not advocating shooting 20 to 40 thousand pics. Who has that kind of time with a model? Neither am I suggesting photographers capture images in the thousands for a single glamour set. But I do believe, quite often, the more images you capture the greater your chances are of capturing that truly killer shot.

So how many captures is enough? That's tough to say. You certainly don't want to shoot so many and for so long that you wear the model out. And you don't want to simply spray-and-pray. That's not going to up the odds of grabbing that stand-out shot. But if you have the time, I would suggest snapping more than you think you need. And don't shoot them all from the same angle or with the same lighting or with, basically, the same poses going on. Shake things up! Every time you capture one that you think is the ultimate "keeper," think how you can make that "keeper" even better. Remember that the difference between a good shot and a great shot is often something very, very subtle. Sometimes it's just that ever-so-slight difference in expression that makes a killer pretty girl shot.

The gratuitous eye-candy at the top is Penny from a few weeks ago. We were on location shooting in the basement of an abandoned hospital in East L.A. Penny was playing a sexually-promiscuous, angst-ridden, police detective in the movie. They had me shooting in a corridor just outside the hospital's morgue. I would have liked to have shot in the morgue--which was pretty cool in a spooky sort of way--but the video's lighting crew were working in there and the director and production manager decided what the lighting guys were doing was more important to the production than what I was doing. Okay. No problem. I didn't get all butt-hurt. I'm pretty thick skinned. So, I set up three lights out in the hallway--a key and two accent lights from behind--and had my way with Penny... in a purely photographic way, that is. I wasn't interested in lighting the environment as it wasn't important to the final product.