[The five final images in my “Hat Dance” series, culled from hundreds of separate shots. Click on any image to enlarge it.]

Working in writing, I’ve long known the value of drafts: getting something at all — a prototype — on paper being the obvious priority, followed by some number of “stepwise refinements” (additions, deletions, amendments…), over and over, until you’ve got the finished work before you. (Or, sometimes, until you’re simply wrung out from the repetitious task. But if that “reason” for quitting comes too often, you might as well forget becoming a professional writer.)

But until recently, photography always seemed different to me: why, I wondered, would you take more than one or two photos of essentially the same subject? Sure, maybe something would obviously be wrong with the first, even maybe the second take… the sun ducks behind a cloud, say, or someone inadvertently walks in front of the camera as you click the shutter. Those, you had to re-shoot. But in recording a single moment, you’d have to accept that once gone, the moment couldn’t be recaptured, right?

As I’ve mentioned before, in the last few months I’ve been trying hard to take photography seriously — starting with the very most basic question: what do I mean by “seriously”? Roughly, what I mean includes these elements:

• Really understanding — and practicing — all the “hard” stuff of photography: the interrelationships among shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and the effects that manipulating those interrelationships have on exposure, depth of field, and so on.
• Learning more about what’s possible in post-processing — the latter-day digital counterparts, in software, of what used to require darkroom hijinks: dodging and burning, cropping, manipulating emulsions and the paper itself…
• Controlling the product rather than simply accepting what’s right in front of me: not “settling.”

To this end, I’ve been taking advantage of my “free” time for two tasks:

First, I’ve been taking a series of refresher courses in photography basics, through the Great Courses Plus streaming channel. (So far: here and here.)

Second, I’ve set up something vaguely like a “studio” out in our garage. I don’t have a lot of fancy equipment — primarily a moving blanket and a black sheet, used as backdrops, supplemented by a stepstool and various boxes used as “stands” for still-life work and for my off-camera strobe flash. (For the camera itself, I’ve got a couple of tripods.

So what’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far? That’s easy, and it brings me back to the first couple paragraphs above: there’s really no reason not to do many takes of the “same” subject, and several legitimate reasons to do so.

Note: One other big change removes pretty much any objection at all to taking many shots of the same subject. I’m referring of course to the cost: developing and possibly printing hundreds of hardcopy photos, vs. simply storing the images on a card.

[Read more…]