Take more photos than you save

When going out to take photos, I've caught myself fairly frequently only raising the camera to my eye when I think I've found the absolute shot of the day, often finding myself not quite ready at all times because my mind is always searching for "The One Shot".

Because of this mindset, I think I've ended up taking less photos and probably on more than one occasion missing "The One Shot".

I've gone through various stages in my journey as a photographer but one thing remains the same: I greatly prefer the act of taking a photo to any other part of the process–and that includes culling (getting rid of the "bad" or subpar photos from a shoot).

I asked myself: Who wants to sit on their computer for hours sifting through dozens if not hundreds of images?

Embarrassingly, this was my mindset for a lot of years. Why take 100 photos when all I need are just one amazing photo, or five?

The answer to that question has brought me back around over time, and now I am firmly in the camp of "Take more photos than you end up saving".

Every photo is another moment of learning

There have been days I've come home from one of my city wanders in Vienna and quite literally formatted the card on my camera. Maybe I had taken a few dozen shots, many of them blurry, many composed badly, or perhaps the light just never hit quite right.

And yet it's the repetition of the action that builds the muscle I need to be able to take the best photos I can.

When we take photos, it is an exercise, a building up of muscle memory and training of what works and what doesn't. It teaches when to take the shot, what sort of lines to look for, when to pause and breathe...and then make the image.

So if you take 100 photos in a day and keep only one, you haven't wasted 99 shots—you're just 99 photos closer to being a better photographer.