“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, “The Writing Life”
I have been spending substantial effort on optimizing my photography workflow. This primarily applies to post-processing, but the concept is also relevant to the overall process of creating an image – from planning to shooting/production to retouching. Having experimented with it, I think that sometimes it is important to consciously forego efficiency for the sake of exploring new ideas or perfecting particular techniques.
It seems that in most aspects of our lives, productivity became the etalon of success (or at least the main indicator for potential for success – whatever the definition of the latter may be). Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that efficiency often tramples presence – active intellectual and emotional engagement with the job at hand.
Drawing again a parallel with kendo, the Japanese Way of the Sword, I learned from a hachidan (8th dan) sensei that personal development requires a combination of quality and quantity of practice. To achieve quantity, certain degree of efficiency is absolutely necessary. After all, nobody has an infinite amount of time to devote to any single aspect of training. However, quality of practice requires presence. As I mentioned in the post about the learning process, we need to engage with the subject and make it own own.
In photography, the focus on efficiency is particularly prominent in high-volume shoots, where increasing the quantity of images offered to the clients is viewed as a way of boosting the overall sales. I would argue that this approach does not necessarily lead to the long-term development of a creative photographer. Personally, I have been working on consciously reducing the number of shots I take in a given photo session. This is not to say that I change my shooting style to the one of the days of analogue film. I just try to think ahead of what I want to capture before firing off a high-speed burst from my 1D X
I believe that quantity of practice for photographers comes from consistency – regularly shooting new projects, either for clients or for personal interest and fun. Quality, on the other hand, is achieved by allowing ourselves to sacrifice some efficiency for presence, i.e. engagement with the subject and the process of creating the image.
