There’s a concept in photography that you might be familiar with. The ‘keeper ratio’ – the proportion of the photographs you take that you think are worth keeping and processing. It’s often thought of as a measure of your success rate, or probably more often of your failure rate. Either way, the concept is based on completely flawed logic. To let the idea of the keeper ratio direct your approach to photography is a massive hindrance to the artistic process.
Following the logic of the keeper ratio to its conclusion, the best photographers must be able to turn up to a location, release the shutter once and go home with a great image. Of course, that’s ludicrous.
A painter doesn’t sit down and create a masterpiece straight off. He makes preliminary sketches, detail studies, and then makes repeated adjustments in the final painting, maybe even starts over multiple times. Neither does an author write a novel from start to finish without making changes, both to the plot and to the way they’ve written it. Why should a photographer be any different?
Iteration and improvement
Making a photograph that works the way you want it to is a process of iteration and improvement. Just as an artist might need several attempts to get the proportions and perspective of a scene right, a photographer might need to change lens and viewpoint, try different compositions, or go back to a subject when the light or the situation is different. In the process – particularly in the digital age – this photographer might make dozens, scores or even hundreds of photographs. The last one of 50 might be the only ‘keeper’, but she wouldn’t have got to that photograph without making the other 49 first.
A page from Magnum Contact Sheets showing ‘sketch images’ taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and his two front-runners for a final image.
To prove this point, take a look at a book called Magnum Contact Sheets. This book contains dozens of iconic photographs by Magnum photographers (that is, some of the most highly regarded photographers in the world) alongside the other images they captured either side of those photographs, on the same film. It’s a striking demonstration of the iteration that the photographers worked through to make that one image, and that real photography isn’t about creating a great image with only one shot.
David DuChemin, an inspirational photographer and photography educator, refers to the process of iteration and improvement as making ‘sketch images’. The parallel with fine art couldn’t be any clearer. This terminology crystallizes the idea of photography as a creative process for me, and helps me feel that I’m engaged in art. It also melts away the underlying anxiety about whether my photographs that I rate are just down to the law of averages.
Similarly, in The Photographer’s Eye and The Photographer’s Mind, photographer Michael Freeman shows sequences of images that he captured while working scenes. He also walks through his thinking during the process to refine his composition and the concept of the photograph. It’s a fascinating insight – reading these books led to my first realisation that my thinking was all wrong.
A gallery of sketch images I took while trying to make the most of these arches in Lisbon, Portugal. The black & white ones are images I thought were worth processing, but my choice of image was the one on the right. Click to see larger versions.
Instinctively, the idea of making sketch images seems to be mostly about the camera work. Of course, this is the fundamental stage, but the idea of sketching can go beyond that and apply to post-processing too.
First, you need to take a step back and look at the sketches you’ve got. A crucial skill in photography is recognising a sketch image that stands out from the others, and why it stands out. Whether or not the reasons were apparent to you at the time of capturing the photograph is irrelevant – choosing images after the event is part of the process.
Then, when you process your selected images, you can try different colour treatments, exposures and contrast levels, different crops and different localised adjustments. You might well produce several different ‘sketches’ at this stage before settling on your ‘finished piece’. You might even play around with different versions of an image and then discard that frame completely. But still, that sketching process was necessary to explore the potential (or lack of it) in the image.
In hindsight, I see that I’ve always done this sketching to some degree. But – as the existence of the keeper ratio concept suggests is the case for many – I saw it as a lack of skill, as fumbling around without knowing what I was doing. Maybe it’s been a bit of both, but the realisation that the sketching process is a necessary stage completely changed my psychological approach.
The process has become more deliberate, and rather than just trying different things as I feel like it, I’m more likely to think about why I’m trying those things. It becomes more deliberate and directed, with an ultimate aim that becomes refined along the way. Working like this, I’m also happier to fill up memory cards without getting downhearted at the prospect that only a handful – or perhaps even none – will be ‘keepers’.
A painter doesn’t sit down and create a masterpiece straight off. Neither does an author write a novel without making changes. Why should a photographer be any different? #photography #art #notebook There’s a concept in photography that you might be familiar with. The ‘keeper ratio’ – the proportion of the photographs you take that you think are worth keeping and processing.
