Machine gun photography
I lurk on the dpreview forums (though never post, it can be rather unpleasant at times) and was rather astonished to see that someone had taken 10,372 shots with his Nikon D2Hs dSLR. “What’s so shocking about that?” you may well ask. The shocking factors are: He’s not a pro working on a job, and he took them in about 5 hours on one day. It averaged 2 shots/second. Phew! Not only that, this was not an unusual weekend’s shooting for him. The really impressive thing was he’d done it on one charge of the battery!
He’d culled the 10K down to just over 1,800 and posted them all on his pBase gallery. His main job is selling dogs and he was taking lots of shots to try and show how cute and appealing his dogs are. Trouble is, there’s a limit to how many dog pictures you can look at before you get bored, especially as an awful lot of them are very, very similar – they are the same particular breed.
The vast majority of the comments on this guy’s shooting style were along the lines of “slow down, compose your shot, go for quality, not quantity”. Each to his/her own, but I agree with these sentiments. Apart from anything else, Nikon only guarantees the shutter for 150K shots and he can only do 15 days at this rate before he’s on borrowed time.
I started photography using film and it has taken quite a lot of time for me to get out of the habit of treating every shot as though it was the last frame on the reel. I rarely use burst mode with digital, just as I rarely used the motordrive in the past, it used to get far too expensive. Apart from anything else, I really can’t be bothered to sort through 20 near identical shots, agonising over which is the best. The most I’ll usually do is a batch of 7 shots, bracketing the exposure in increments either side of what I think is the right reading given the subject in question and if I think the metering is going to be fooled. In the film days it would have been a batch of 4 at most.
When the Canon 350D had just launched and a big feature being pushed in the marketing was the continuous shooting rate and associated large buffer. I recall one comment posted about “machine gun photography” with a statement along the lines of “hold the button down until the buffer/card is full and hope that something interesting has passed in front of the lens in the meantime”. Cruel, but I dare say there’s some that use it that way.
Do you blast away, or take your time? The subject for further discussion is: Do you advocate machine gun photography, and if so, why?
Regards,
Duncan.
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