Pixels may be Free, but Attention is Priceless.

Some concerned readers have written in, concerned that I'm involved in some sort of elaborate Nikon suicide pact, owing to the fact that I've taken about a fifth of the number of exposures the d300's shutter is rated for. Also, as one friend put it,

"Good God, that's like 150 photos/day!"

It's not quite that bad -- I go out on trips on weekends, and shoot a lot then. But it is the case I've made a religious observance of bringing my camera with me everywhere possible. Like a lot of things, I'm sure there's a Right Way to do this and a Wrong Way.

I'm sure The Wrong Way would entail something like this:

• Bring your camera with you everywhere
• Shoot everything
• Download your daily 150 (or weekend-ly 2,000 photos)
• Upload them all to Flickr daily

If you think about it, this is basically the 'vacation' model of photography. Take everything you see, come home, upload it all, except you'd be living it every day. I don't think it's a great way to learn, and you'll likely be frustrated if you try. Your friends will also likely de-friend you on Flickr, which is the closest modern-day equivalent to being drummed out of the camp because of your fresh case of leprosy that I can think of.

What's missing from the Vacation Philosophy of photography is two things:

• Mindfulness
• A profound love of throwing things out

Mindfulness is the biggie, but I hate to use it because it's something Zen posers are always saying. "Why don't you go to mindfulness training, Brandon?" "Practice a little mindfulness, and find inner peace!". "The quality of mindfulness is not lost on this one, oh Buddha". On and on and on, and since I live in California, I hear this sort of thing on a regular basis.

Lemme describe what I mean in another way. Some years ago, I embarked on a program to lose a lot of weight. The first thing I did was not to exercise more, eat less, change the number of carbs, or anything like that -- it was simply to write down what I ate each day. Studies show that simply doing this is enough to start losing some weight, and the people who bother to do this find it easier to actually start exercising or dieting.

Turns out, simply paying attention to what you're doing is often enough for our brains to perk up and realize something may be wrong (or right!) with your behavior. When it comes to photography, I get myself to pay attention by asking questions. The first, and most basic one is this: Why do I want to take this photo? There ae a lot of good answers to this question, but the only really bad one is: "I can't think of why." Just like dieting, you can ratchet up your expectations over time, and start asking yourself questions like, "Would I waste a friend's time with this photo? Would this photo be something I'd be happy to hang on my wall? Can this photo tell the story of this event? Could I use this photo to teach a class? Will this photo pay the mortgage? [Ok, that's a good joke]". But always start with why you want to take the photo -- and if, after reflecting, you don't have a reason, don't shoot the photo. :)

The second, and just as important thing you can do, is to throw photos out. Let's say you've taken your one hundred and fifty photos for the day, and are staring listlessly in your overpriced copy of Lightroom (or underpowered version of iPhoto). The first thing you want to do is to upload them to share them to everyone, right?

[Crickets]

There's a rule with digital photography that says, "Pixels are Free". It's correct, and only grows more correct in the limit as we get closer and closer to storing terabytes for pennies, petabytes for dimes, and exabytes for dollars, until our brains are all uploaded into a set of poorly written perl scripts that pilot post-human mechs around the surface of Neptune, taking glorious snaps of those icy rings. But like most things, PF has a dual principle, waiting to bite us. It goes like this:

"Pixels may be Free, but Attention is Priceless."

The old world -- the one with film, paper books, and big, clunky, one-room computers, had a different set of rules. Try, "This shit costs money!", or "There's only so much space on the shelf." The new world has a different set of limitations, but the most important one is that at the bottom of all those free pixels, fat pipes, and amazing low light performance, is us. Plain old human brains, evolved to not keep more than seven things in our head at once, and catastrophically unprepared for Modern Times. All that neat stuff, and a tiny, narrow little window of attention to grab someone.

So, if you're going to reach people with your photos, you're going to have to learn how to Cut. It's going to hurt, because anyone who does even the tiniest little creative thing marries it at least a little. But if you're going to learn from taking a lot of pictures, you're going to have to sit down at that computer, and ask yourself a new question: "Why did I take that photo? What was I thinking?". If you can't answer that question, cut it. Deleting it is best, hiding it in a featureless archive in the sky is a close second, but what you upload should be there for a reason. This doesn't mean you can't keep a 'gallery of monsters' around, to teach yourself why something was an epic fail, or nearly, but didn't quite work. But it does mean you have to have made that distinction in your head, and emotionally come to terms with that failure.

Processing my photos and throwing them away is one of the hardest things I've ever done, because I'm a pack rat. I love to hoard things. But throwing it out is the best thing there is for learning. It's both an object lesson -- "So wow, on camera flash really does look like ass", and a carrot: "If I don't do this next time, I won't have to throw it out!". Once you've done this, you can start asking yourself things like, "What can I do to fix this photo? Could I make it work in post processing if I just did this one thing?", and so on.

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I dunno if these things will work for you (I don't necessarily advise taking 30,000 photos in seven months), but I think it's an invaluable way to force yourself to learn.

More to come in my next post, which is an example of the benefits of always having your camera.