Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

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If No One Ever Saw It
Would you still take this shot if no one ever saw it? The answer to that can tell us important things about our goals and motivation.
There are many reasons for shooting images. I am focusing on “serious” pictures. Not just selfies or simple travel pictures or sunsets. Rather, ones where we are motivated to put our best effort into it because it is important to us. Where we are trying to create something lasting.
Shoot for hire
Some photographers are hired to create images for a client. It may be commercial photography or weddings or other things. but the result is that you will shoot images as specified by the client. They expect to see most if not all of the shoot.
This is a good way to earn money and build a reputation. If you can impose some of your style and personality on the result, it can also be a creative outlet. But ultimately, the client dictates.
In the context of this article, the point is that the client expects to see most of your shots. They will pick the ones they want to use.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Shoot for a competition
Sometimes we shoot for a competition. Whether it is International Photographer of the Year or your local camera club monthly contest, the process is generally the same.
We probably are given a subject or genre to focus on. We may have a deep catalog of relevant images to choose from, or we may go out and shoot specifically for the contest.
But ultimately, we will have to go through the painful process of deleting all except the one (or 5 or 10, depending on the contest) that will be submitted. Then it will be judged and, hopefully, shown to the “world” as a winner.
The point is that this is an outward focused process. The result of the exercise is to carefully present our star image to the world to compete. Sometimes we even study past winning images and the judges to try to game the system and give ourselves an edge.
The goal is to win in a public arena. Maybe at the expense of what we really like best.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Shoot for exposure
Many believe the siren song of “likes”. That lots of clicks, comments, and followers makes us a “real” artist, maybe even important.
I am having to talk here from what i have observed. I do not personally participate in this. Sorry if I overstate it.
I will just ask what has that social media presence earned you, versus what it has cost you? Becoming well-known and widely followed, maybe even becoming an ‘influencer”, is usually a long process with lots of time and effort. It involves learning the algorithms used by your social media channels of choice and trying to optimize for them. Maybe this involves conforming to the type of work that is popular with their viewers. The things that usually get “likes’.
This may not be the work you resonate with. Perhaps your real creative work is unpublished.
Keeping up with this takes a lot of time and may involve bending our artistic vision to the popular taste du jour. I can see that if you are a commercial photographer this might be a way to get visibility and some new clients. But I do not play this game. It is not worth it to me.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Shoot for ourselves
Or, if you are very lucky or strong minded, you decide to shoot primarily for yourself. You are the audience who matters.
It is hard to get rich or famous like this, so why would anyone choose to do it? Well, I believe that comes down to our goals, our personality, and our situation.
Is your goal to be famous and, maybe, rich? Or is it to satisfy some creative need within? I shoot to fill that creative need. I am an introvert. The marketing and self-promotion required to shoulder my way into the mainstream art world is alien to my personality. It is too big a price for me to pay. Trying to do that made my art drudgery, not creative fun. Plus, I am very lucky and grateful that my situation doesn’t require me to earn my living from my art. At this point in my life, I can reserve it for my personal joy and expression.
I realize that everyone is different and has varying goals and needs. This is just being honest about my motives.
You won’t see it
So, back to the question of what if no one sees it. I think I have established that my primary audience is myself. I’m not trying to make my income from photography, and I do not really care about likes or comments. They are welcome when they happen, but they are not the reason for making an image.
I do share some images with friends and the occasional show entry or online article, like here. Even an infrequent hanging in a gallery. Most of my images are for sale. But I would give a print away to a friend who appreciates it rather than sell it for an insulting price that doesn’t even cover my costs.
And the ones anyone does see just are the tip of the iceberg. I would not show an image I am not proud of. That means only a small portion of the images I shoot might ever be seen.
If I shoot thousands of images but only consider a few of them worthy of being seen, am I a failure? Not in my mind. My standards are high, and I am not motivated to try to get much seen publicly.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Would I shoot it?
Photography is mainly a creative exercise for me. I resonate with the challenge of trying to do something above average with the scene I find. If I am learning and growing and making fresh new work that pleases me, I am content. That is my standard and reason for making pictures. Your mileage may vary.
So, would I take the shot if no one ever saw it? Trick question. I will see it, and I am the audience that matters for my work. Yes, whenever I get the chance, I will shoot it. It may not be a “money” shot. It may not make me famous. But if it excites me, that is what is important.
Note: The inspiration of the phrase “if no one ever saw it” came from Nuno Alves on Medium.
October 8, 2025
Depth of Insight
In a recent Medium article, Marc Overmars gave a good introductory description of depth of field (DOF) This is a technical term uniquely applicable to photography. I want to take the concept in a somewhat more philosophical direction. Maybe there is a concept of depth of insight.
Purely technical
On the surface, depth of field is purely a technical concept. it only applies to photography, because it is associated with the physics of focusing through a lens.
I went into some of the issues in a previous blog. Sorry for the math. 🙂 I know most people don’t like that. I don’t have much use for it either, and I would never use it when I’m out in the field shooting, but some level of understanding is helpful for mastery of the art.
Maybe the most challenging concept from that article, and a fundamental concept of DOF, is “circle of confusion”. The idea that there are acceptable levels of unsharpness. Very briefly, only one point in the frame is technically “in focus”. But practically, a certain amount of unsharpness can be tolerated before we would consider something blurry. The size of this allowable unsharpness is called the circle of confusion. So, when your DOF calculator gives you a distance range, those are the points where the focus becomes unacceptably blurry. The math is exact, but the concept isn’t.
Perhaps there are analogies in our understanding of what we shoot.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Looking deeper
Let’s set the math and technical details aside for now. I can hear the sigh of relief.
I propose that there is an analogous concept concerning the sharpness of our intent when we are shooting. That is, did I just point my camera at a subject, make a decent composition, and shoot? Or was I clear in my mind why I was taking the picture and what it was really about?
I have often referenced the Ansel Adams quote that “There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” There are 2 reasons for that. First, it is a brilliant observation. Second, it is something I struggle with, so it is very real and close to me.
Yes, I can compose, and I can use good technique to get the sharpness I want. I can use light to my advantage, and I have a lot of experience post processing. But even so, I often look at my images in despair. Too often they are sharp images of a fuzzy concept. When I am honest with myself, I know that sometimes I didn’t have much in mind when I shot them.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Art happens in our head
Maybe it is too obvious to state, but art happens in our head, not in the camera or the computer. As with any definite statement about art, this is a generalization. Sure, there have been many times when I was working with a scene and experimenting (e.g. playing), and things seemed to come together. That is the exception, though.
All too often I look at my images and realize they are, at best, just record shots of a place I was at. No depth of insight. Not much below the surface to give you a reason to pause over it and consider it.
The fault is entirely my own. I didn’t have anything to say, and I said it.
There is a marked contrast with the images I get when I go out to shoot a project, or ones I shoot when I feel strongly about the subject or the situation. Many more of them are strong and satisfying.
We all know this: the more we put into something the more we are likely to get out of it. Why don’t I remember it more when I am out shooting?
My excuse, other than simply laziness, is that I like to go out exploring and shoot interesting things I come across. I don’t always find interesting or “deep” things. That is just that, an excuse. Maybe it is as much that I didn’t have much to say that day. I try to remind myself of Jay Maisel‘s quote that “If you talk with nothing to say, that’s bad. When you shoot with nothing to say, that’s worse.”
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Circle of confusion
So, is there a “circle of confusion” concept for our shooting? Maybe so. If we can’t get our ideas into focus, maybe we shouldn’t shoot. Do our ideas have to be in perfect focus? No. Like the technical term, maybe there is an acceptable level of unsharpness. I hope so.
What do I mean by this? Well, sometimes I realize exactly what the scene means to me, and I can determine exactly how to shoot it. That is great. I am often happy with the result. Sometimes, though, I just have a feeling, a sense of what I am experiencing. I have learned to follow those instincts even if I cannot clearly express their meaning at the moment. If something is drawing me, there is probably a reason.
Later, while editing, I may realize what was calling me to it. Sometimes an image I was initially dismissive of emerges as the strongest of the shoot. It could be that’s just luck. I prefer to think my instincts were trying to tell me something.
Maybe I am being too hard on myself. Jay Maisel also said “You always end up with too many pictures to edit and too few that you feel ‘got it’.” I suppose the feeling is common to all photographers, but it still is frustrating.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Projects for focus
I am learning to use projects to help me focus more clearly. A project is a chance to think deeply about something, decide how I feel about it, and then find opportunities to express it.
It is basic psychology that when you are concentrating on something you are more attune to it. A simple example: a friend was thinking about buying a Nissan car. I don’t think about there being many of them around, but after that conversation it seemed like every other car I saw was a Nissan. I was more attuned to them.
A somewhat more relevant example is from a recent trip to France. It was a family trip, not a dedicated photo expedition. But I didn’t want to come back with just random tourist shots. So, I created a few projects to keep in mind to focus my thoughts and energy. One of them I called Sacred Places. It helped me be much more aware of cathedrals, of course, but also monuments and memorials and standing stones. Even a small village celebration of their liberation in WWII. I felt it helped me to see more opportunities, and I looked deeper at the occasions I found.
If I don’t see it, why should you?
Circling back to Jay Maisel’s quote: “If you talk with nothing to say, that’s bad. When you shoot with nothing to say, that’s worse.” If we can’t focus our feelings and experience, are we shooting with nothing to say? Just taking a sharp or well composed picture isn’t enough. If you can’t participate in the experience I felt, then I’m not bringing you anything other than an “I was there” picture. Maybe it is pretty, but there isn’t much to feel or remember.
Perhaps I do not have to be able to precisely express what I was feeling at that moment. Maybe there is a “circle of confusion” associated with our understanding of the image we are creating that gives us some margin for imprecision. But the circle of confusion in focusing helps discuss a range of acceptable sharpness, not permission to be out of focus. Maybe there is a range of acceptable understanding of our feelings leading to making an image. But little or no understanding is out of range. With no real understanding or feeling, there is little interest for viewers. Have something to say.
I am starting to concentrate. much more on depth of insight than depth of field.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Head image
I mentioned having Sacred Places in mind and encountering a memorial celebration in a small village in France. The image at the top was a result of that. We happened, by accident, to be there on the day of their annual celebration of liberation in WWII. They still remember and memorialize it to this day. That is heartwarming.
This flag display was presented while local dignitaries and military officials made speeches. I didn’t understand enough French to follow it, but it was moving.
Having the Sacred Placed project in mind made me more attuned to this. We stayed for all of it and loved being there. When they discovered that we were Americans I barely avoided having to give a speech at their village celebration afterward.
I hope a little of the dignity and solemnity of their memorial comes through.
October 1, 2025
Challenge and Stimulation
We are all motivated by different things. That is good. Otherwise, we would all make the same art of the same subjects. But do you understand your personal challenges and stimulation?
Different personalities
Our personality type partially determines what motivates us and how we approach our art. I have mentioned introverts versus extroverts, but there are other dimensions.
Some of us are visual learners. We take in new ideas best through pictures, diagrams, even videos. Others receive information best through words. There is not a best way. It all depends on how we are wired. I am more of a visual learner.
Some want to carefully design their art and work slowly and deliberately. Others work better at a fast moving, “run & gun” approach. Some feel that their images must be created entirely in camera in a single frame. Others prefer to manipulate images heavily and even composite them together. Some like hyper-realistic, razor sharp images where others prefer to use intentional camera motion to create impressionistic images.
All people can make art, but they must approach it in the way that makes sense to them.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Different goals
Some of us are challenged by the hunt, the contest. We need to be working toward a goal of a competition. It is a contest against others. Winning is the motivation. A prize and its bragging rights are up for grabs.
Others of us could care less about that. We are challenged by inward values and goals. We are self-motivated to do our best work even if just for ourselves. An audience is nice, but not necessary.
There is not a best way. What matters is what works for you.
I got frustrated recently reading David duChemin’s Light, Space, and Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity . He goes on a lot about working a scene from many angles and points of view to get the “best” shot. The best shot seemed to be all important. Then I realized he is an extrovert. I should have figured that out from a video I saw of him. As an extrovert, the product is the goal. With me, an introvert, it is more the experience.
There is no one right way in art.
We need challenge
However it comes, we all need challenge and stimulation. Challenge gets us out the door on a cold morning. We are seeking something. We need to do this. Some people need the fire of competition to test and motivate them.
Challenge might come from wanting to enter a contest or the prospect of a gallery show or to pay the bills. Or it might be the need to answer questions for ourselves. Questions like what can I do with this topic, or is there more interest to be found in this subject I have photographed many times?
Challenges do not have to be public. It could be a personal quest. One for me has been to get what I consider and interesting and non-cliché shot of the Eiffel Tower. That is a challenge for such an iconic and over-shot subject.
It may be the challenge of having “failed” to get results we were happy with in previous attempts with a subject but believing there is a better way to do it if we just learn from our mistakes and dig deeper.
Whatever it is for us, our challenge presents us with a goal or idea that has been out of our reach, but we are striving for it. We need to elevate our art, our ideas, our craft a little to get there. It is an effort, and it tests our ability.
We all need to test our ability frequently. Whether it is by entering competitions or by our self-examination when we review our images in Lightroom, we need to honestly evaluate if we are growing as an artist. Challenges stimulate growth.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
We need stimulation
Maybe I should say that I need stimulation. I realize that we are all different.
Stimulation is different from a challenge. It is an encouragement to reach beyond your present state. Stimulation is that spark that ignites something in us, that tweaks our interest. It gets us excited.
Each of us is stimulated by different things at different times. I do not think there are any universal answers. I can only give anecdotes of the kind of things that stimulate me.
Travel stimulates me. When I am out of my home area, things look different. I look at things as new and interesting. It energizes me and helps me to continue to see things fresh when I get home.
Learning stimulates me. New ideas, new images, new techniques add to the mix of things swirling in my head and sometimes pop out in surprising new ways. That is exciting. It might even take my art in a new direction. It is great to feel that you have stepped up to a new level.
I don’t usually need stimulation to get out the door and take pictures. But it helps to break me out of ruts and look at the world in new ways.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Creativity
We humans sometimes need to be prodded to do our best work. Challenges and stimulation are part of that. I view it as the classic carrot and stick. Stimulation is the carrot. It energizes and excites us to go forward. Challenge is the stick. We have accepted a challenge now we have to get busy and go for it to keep from failing.
Creativity is not well understood, despite many smart Psychologists spending whole careers studying it. Creativity seems to happen in our subconscious. That is why ideas “pop out” at seemingly random times, like when you’re going to sleep or in the shower.
The process may not be understood, but history tells me we can do things to feed our mind and encourage our subconscious to be more creative. Some of the important things are these ideas of challenge and stimulation. And keep working. It is important to avoid just sitting around feeling sorry for our lack of creativity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Feed your head
My model is that we can lure our subconscious to work for us by assigning it a task. Say we want to create a new art project that is significantly different from our normal work. We do not know the best way to approach it or even understand yet what the end should look like. But by turning it over to our subconscious and letting it work on it without much interruption from us, we are often surprised later to find that we have clarified our thoughts a lot and now have a direction for the project. Maybe a creative new direction.
Giving the subconscious a goal is setting the challenge. But for me, it needs stimulation to energize it. The stimulation is often completely unrelated to the goal. Start to learn a new language, research how knives are forged, read a biography of a famous person, go to a museum. I’m not sure it matters as long as we are stimulating our mind with new learning and following our curiosity. (TikTok is not new learning) I do believe that the new information makes new connections in our mind and energizes it to do creative work.
Surprises happen. That is creativity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Push through
So, when we get stuck and it seems the creative muse has left, often the best things to do is to not worry about it. Instead, decide if there are some challenges you are wanting to undertake. Then go on a learning binge. Don’t stress about your challenges or lack of creativity. Just follow your curiosity and learn new things. Immerse yourself in something new that is stimulating to you.
Keep working, but don’t try to force the creativity. You may not be doing career changing art, but it is important to keep trying. Creativity will come back even stronger, but in its own time. When it happens, accept it and be grateful. And it will happen if you challenge it and stimulate it.
September 24, 2025
You Still Need To Backup
Backup is one of those hygiene subjects we would rather not think about or talk about. But it is important. You need to backup intentionally and consistently.
Film days
Back in the “good ole’ days of film”, (they weren’t really the good days) we never had to worry about backup. The developed film was the permanent physical backup.
All we had to worry about was storing it properly and in a fireproof location. These days, finding a fireproof location is more of a challenge. Photographers who had some exceptionally valuable images might have duplicate film images created and stored in a vault or safety deposit box.
I have many filing cabinet drawers full of slides and negatives. Sadly, I never look at them. Partly because they are old and I have improved a lot and changed my interests some. But mainly because, being physical instead of digital, they are hard to search and locate. I can’t see me ever taking the time to scan them all.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Digital days
I expect the majority of you reading this shoot digital exclusively. I know I do. Digital has many advantages. Obviously, since it has almost completely taken over photography.
But digital. has a huge disadvantage. The image data is ephemeral. It has no physical presence. If we delete the file, it is gone. Permanently, if it is not backed up.
What would happen if your main image disk said “poof” and a little smoke leaks out? All your images are gone unless they are backed up. As if they never existed. Most of us would consider this a disaster.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Disks fail
But disks are very reliable, aren’t they? We can find published reliability numbers like 1,000,000 hours MTBF (mean time before failure). That sounds very safe.
But those are projected statistics for large numbers of disks. My particular drive could fail tomorrow. And they do. I am sitting here looking at a stack of 11 failed disk drives that I am waiting to get in the mood to take outside and smash with a sledge hammer.
SSD drives seem to be more reliable than rotating magnetic disks. Seem to be. But let me reveal a dirty secret about solid state drives: they are so unreliable that they are extensively engineered to mask their failures. Bits fail all the time. Whole sections of an SSD can go bad. The drives have sophisticated error correction algorithms built in to allow for this and keep them functioning with no apparent data loss. Kind of like RAID built in.
They haven’t been around long enough to have conclusive data, but in general, SSD’s seem to be more reliable than magnetic disks. But they fail.
Don’t get me wrong, SSD’s are an improvement, and I will switch when prices go down enough for the quantity of storage I need. My point, though, is that SSD’s still fail. They are not some magical device you can forever trust your valuable images to and be guaranteed safe.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Clouds fail
So, the obvious solution seems to be put all your data in the cloud. Right? Let somebody else handle the storage management.
There are problems. Cloud storage gets pretty expensive in the quantities most serious photographers need. And keep in mind that this is an ongoing expense.
And how fast is your internet for upload speed? I am fortunate to be served by one of the best internet providers in the nation. Theoretically, in perfect conditions, I could upload a Terabyte of data to the cloud in a little over 3 hours. IF everything is perfect and if the cloud storage could accept data that fast. Previous internet providers I had would take weeks to upload this much data, because upload speed was much slower than the download speed.
But even if you successfully get your data into the cloud, it is now at the mercy of the service you use. They can go out of business, or change business models, or raise prices. If you use Azure or the Amazon cloud your data is probably pretty safe. Maybe even Adobe. But you have no control. I like to control what is important to me.
Lightroom cloud?
Maybe the Lightroom cloud storage is the right answer for you. It is for some. If you are just starting out in photography, it may be ideal for you.
The latest data I saw said Adobe offers up to 1TByte of storage. That’s the tip of the iceberg of the 10 TBytes of image data I currently have. If they offer that much storage, it would be expensive. If I work an image in Photoshop and composite multiple images and use lots of layers, it can exceed 4GBytes for one image. That eats up terabytes fast.
And to access your images, you must have internet access. I have a fantastic internet provider, but outages still happen occasionally. Yes, Lightroom stores a highly compressed small version of images locally on your computer, but that does.not seem good enough to me.
There are some other reasons I will not use the cloud version of Lightroom, but they are not directly related to backup problems.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Seize control
Digital image data is a blessing and a curse. There are significant advantages to it, but never forget, it can easily go away.
So we must proactively manage our data. That means backup. An aggressive, thorough backup plan that you monitor. This is a time to be paranoid.
If you are on a Mac, step one is to plug in a large external disk and enable Time Machine. This is the automatic backup system built into Macs. It is so good that it may, all by itself, be a reason to switch to Macs. I’m not kidding. Make sure it is configured to also backup your image data.
I will give you a glimpse into how paranoid I am in protecting my data. Even though my main image storage is a RAID system, my data is backed up hourly to Time Machine, and daily to two external disks, one of which is a network attached RAID drive. Every week I also make a copy that I keep offsite, and about once a month I make another snapshot of my data that is kept offline and safe.
Some local backup with a layer of cloud backup is a feasible alternative now, but so far, I have chosen not to go that route.
That sounds like a lot of work, but except for the weekly and monthly offsite backups that are not normally physically connected, it is all automatic. Thank you Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. The CCC plug is FYI and just to let you know the specific tool I use. I get no consideration for recommending it.©Ed Schlotzhauer
Make it automatic
I admit, I am paranoid about my digital assets. They have been created over a long time with lots of work and expense, and they are precious to me. I do not intend to loose them because of a preventable accident.
Earlier I mentioned a stack of 11 failed disk drives. That is just the current accumulation. Many more have failed over my time of being a digital photographer. But I have never lost a file because of a disk failure.
I believe a well thought out, in depth backup plan is a must for any serious photographer today. Perhaps I overdo it. But I am not willing to take the risk of doing too little.
I have tried to be clear that this is just my way of doing backup. Like all photographic workflow decisions, it is usually a personal choice. Yours may be lighter weight or more rigorous. Do what works for you. But do it.
Do not let backup be something you might remember to do once in a while, if you think of it. You won’t think of it at the right time. The clock is ticking.
September 17, 2025
Run & Gun
There are arguments for working slowly and carefully. But there are times when we must be fast and in automatic reaction mode. There is no one-size-fits-all in photography. Sometimes the best choice, or your only choice, is run & gun.
What is run & gun
I doubt there are any hard definitions of this, but by run & gun I mean shooting fast and without prior planning. It is working fluidly, rapidly, instinctively, without setups or lots of takes. Some would call it “fast and loose.”
This is often constrained by external circumstances. The. idea comes to mind for me because I just got back from a vacation in Europe where I was put in exactly this situation on most of the tours I did. These were not specific photo tours. Rather, one where the guide says, “here is the Strasbourg Cathedral; go in and look around and meet back here in 15 minutes.” Gulp. No planning, no chance to work the scene, no bracketing, not even a tripod. I have never even seen this place before and do not know what to expect, other than that it is one of the tallest churches in the world.
Other situations where this is necessary are sports photography, concert photography, or candid wedding photography. All are places where we cannot control the action or pose the subjects.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for slow
It’s easy to argue the merits of shooting slow. We have time to contemplate, to consider options. To walk around and look at different angles. Maybe to wait for better light.
This is the kind of shooting Ansel Adams or John Fielder would do. When you are carrying heavy, large format cameras way out into the field and exposing expensive film plates, it imposes a discipline on you.
You would always use a tripod (necessary for slow film anyway). You would compose carefully and thoughtfully. Exposures would be calculated in detail, maybe using the Zone System to make sure all the tones are captured and placed where you can do the darkroom work you want later.
In slow shooting you may go out for a day of shooting and come back with a dozen or so exposed images. But each is very carefully considered.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for working a scene
On the other hand, in Light, Space, and Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity, (I get no consideration for the reference) David duChemin argues eloquently for working a scene thoroughly. That is, to shoot your first instinct, then to move and shoot more, look at it from different angles, try to refine your idea and improve on what you did.
He says that, when teaching workshops, if a student says they are not happy with their work, he scans through their images on their camera. He is not looking for technique but for the number of frames they shot of it. His point is that if the student shot 3 images of something and then stopped, they did not explore the possibilities adequately.
I believe most photographers would improve their work if they did this. Most of us shoot digital now, so we are not limited by the cost or bulk of film. We can review our images immediately on the camera. This quick feedback can help, especially if we are learning composition and camera technique.
It is amazing how even a slight movement or re-framing can make a huge difference in the impact of an image. Having the time and self-discipline to do this can be beneficial.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Arguments for shooting less
On yet another hand, I just read an article by a friend, Dean Allen, arguing that we should shoot less. His is a minimalist argument. The burden of sifting through all those excess images we shoot to find the few good ones is time consuming. It is hard to find the needles in the haystack.
Doing this would certainly save a lot of time culling and editing. I think most photographers would rather be out making images instead of sitting at the computer. So yes, in this sense, fewer is better.
It sounds attractive to say to only shoot the good ones, but I would counter that it is very hard to tell at the time which one will be the best.
But when that doesn’t work
There are situations where one of these disciplined approaches can’t be used effectively. I mentioned being on a tour with limited time to see a spectacular location. There are others.
My nature is that I do not like to perturb a situation to set up a shot. Whether that is on a tour in a cathedral or at a sports event or a family gathering or doing street photography, I prefer to accept what I find then use my skill and experience to be able to get a good image.
This is a basic conflict with my wife. She thinks good pictures of people have them lined up in front of whatever the scene is, staring at the camera, with big smiles on their faces. I would never do this. To me the shot to work for is a candid capture that reveals someone’s personality or thoughts or feelings. One that shows them doing something natural and characteristic.
Not trying to control the situation is a healthy acceptance of reality. And an opportunity for creativity.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Skill and reflexes
Sometimes you must shoot fast and instinctively. There is no opportunity for planning or even thinking much. The run & gun approach. This is a learned skill. One that I enjoy working on.
To me this is a kind of dance between me and the subject. They are moving or doing whatever they do, and I have to be in sync with them, to anticipate the movement, to recognize the right composition and moment and be ready to react instantly.
It would be nice at times to be able to spend time to move and re-frame and shoot lots of trials, but that is usually not an option in this style of shooting. I find that I am in reaction mode. That is not bad. It is a kind of hunting, where I have a general idea of what I want, and I am patiently looking and waiting for the situation or composition to develop, then I must recognize it and act fast.
It is a rush of adrenaline and satisfaction when I press the shutter and know I have captured a good image.
One way to practice this is to go to a High School football game. Decide what the interest is to you – the action on the field, the sidelines, the cheerleaders, the fans – and to concentrate on that.
If you have kids or grandkids, they are a rich opportunity. They will be comfortable enough with you around that they will ignore you and go about their play.
Using a camera is the best practice, because you are working with the actual framing and exposure and lighting and people. And the get the real feedback to see how you did.
But sometimes in these situations, I simulate it. That is, I imagine I am using a certain focal length lens, I try to visualize the composition as the camera would see it, then think “click” when I would press the shutter. It is good practice for reacting, but you do not get the feedback of seeing actual results.
Expect lots of bad pictures until you get the timing and reflexes. Don’t be discouraged when good results do not come fast. Keep on learning and practicing. Even after a lot of practice, do not expect the same percentage of keepers you normally get.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Adapt to the situation
I do not believe there is a single right approach to photography, unless you are a commercial photographer in a narrow product niche. Different situations present different opportunities and challenges. It is good to practice approaching scenes from a variety of perspectives and with different skill sets.
Shooting in a run & gun manner is right for some times. And there is a certain wild exuberance from shooting this way. Especially if you are comfortable with it and you have practiced enough to have a good success rate. It is one of my preferred ways to work.
I love the challenge of taking things as I find them and seeing what I can make of them. In some situations, it may be the only way to shoot.
Try it. You may love it.
September 10, 2025