Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
The other day I was looking through my Adobe Lightroom catalogue – it is the software I use to organize my photography collection. I have been using it for about a year now and I love it. I noticed that in the last year I have about 41,000 photos in my collection. That does not include the photos I deleted in the camera or photos that I deleted from the hard drive.
If I just make a random guess I probably have taken 55,000 photos. That would be about 150 photos a day! And I know that I often go a few days without taking photos – so yeah it can be insane. This weekend alone I took about 950 photos for 3 different photo shoots. And of those 950 there will be about 120 photos that will see the light of day and will be given to the clients. And those photos will help create a lifetime of memories.
I look at photos I took a year ago and I often groan – I find fault. But this is a good thing? Does this mean that now I am better than I was a year ago? I think so. And those photos are in the past – they are history. The photos have been shared with clients, family, the internet. Today I will create new photographs and they will be awesome.
Tomorrow is another day – and I will be even better. For those budding photographers – the key to improving your photography is to photograph, photograph, and then photograph some more.
I keep looking forward – challenging myself to take a better photograph.