When in doubt, keep clicking!
I used to buy a lot of photography books when I got started in this hobby. Reading them, I was always amazed that the writer had shot both good and bad shots while in the field to show the better way to do things. Then it hit me. Maybe they weren't as good as they say they were and what turned out to be a bad shot, was not taken on purpose that way.
Fast forward a few years later. I am sitting at a conference with the president of Kodak (before film died) giving a speech. Half way through, he points at the photographer taking pictures of him and said, "the biggest difference between him and casual photographers is that he takes a lot more pictures!" Implying that is how he achieves the few good images.
So don't be overly impressed by the images I have shown in this thread
. They are a few good images out of a sea of bad ones. In a typical day shooting wildlife images, I take about 1,500 images. Out of those, there are 30 to 40 decent ones and only a handful of great ones! My entire photo library has 120,000 images in it
:.
One of the great things about digital is that it doesn't cost anything to shoot multiple images. Get yourself a larger memory card. Put your camera on continuous shooting mode if it has one. And fire away when there is an exciting moment. Even when the situation is slow, like a portrait, I take many shots as even split second timing difference can result in an image with drastically different feel. Check these examples:
All shot stats the same:
Canon Eos 1D MK II, f4.0, 1/250sec, ISO 500, 70-200 zoom at 200mm.
In the first, the focus is on the hat and scissor through it. The next two are classic portraits but one is carefree and happy with the lean back stance and the other, the eyes sharply look through you. These three images are probably out of a dozen I took. In other cases, I have 50+ images of the same girl, hoping to capture that rare and priceless expression.
Now you might say I lack talent to take that right image with one or two frames. Well, that would be true
. There are people who take very few images and make them count. For my defense, I would say that we have horrible tools to achieve that. How the heck do you see minor facial expressions through that quarter inch viewfinder or the low res LCD? It is easy to examine them on your computer here. Not so when you are in the field and struggling as I was through the crowd to capture those nature shots amongst many alternatives.
Thank heavens the cost of memory has come so far down. I remember my first 2 Gig and 4 Gig flash cards both cost $1,000 each! People used to be in shock when I would pull them out of camera. But that large card gave me extreme freedom to take images and maximize my chances of coming home with a good image. It is not like to you can go back to Tokyo the next day and take the above shots
.