Over-shoot

I take about 1,500 images per session. Is this too many? Shaun Hall

AIt’s a lot – but I doubt very much that you are alone in your trigger-fingered approach Shaun! Personally, it would be a fairly unusual shoot for me to take that many images in one session, but I’m not saying I’ve never done it!

If you are shooting that many images in one go I’d ask myself a few basic questions. Is every image different, or are you getting a large number of images exactly the same? Are you later deleting a large number of these images? How much consideration are you giving to composition and exposure when you are shooting? If the answers to these questions are “they’re the same”, “I’m deleting a lot”, and “very little”, you need to think about your approach.

Certainly my advice is to slow down and be a bit more considerate over what you are photographing. If you are shooting action, you may well need to fire off short bursts of frames to get the shot, but otherwise working in single-shot mode might reduce the amount of images you are taking.

Digital photography gives us the opportunity to take as many photos as we like, in a way that film photography never did because of the inherent film processing costs. Overall this is good, because it allows us to experiment and learn from our mistakes, but it can also make us frenetic photographers – relying on volume to get

that one good shot, rather than taking a steady and thoughtful approach to achieve the image we want.