Good Advice

Nobody needs to see your lousy photos.

I had a photography teacher (Richard Stromberg at The Chicago Photography Center) tell me once that if you get one good shot on a roll of 36, you were doing good. That's the ratio: 36:1. When you edit ruthlessly like that, you come out with great results. People think you're better than you are. It's not that you became a brilliant photographer, it's just that you started exercising taste and restraint.

It's one of the biggest challenges in the digital age: When you can bombard people with everything, it's tempting to do so. That's why taste, restraint, and editing are so important. Sometimes it's about throwing out the 35 bad shots and revelling in the one great shot.

Signal vs. Noise

With the freedom of digital photography, I sometimes feel lucky if I get one great shot out of a hundred. Makes it all the more frustrating, then, to still look through a series of photos and realize that there's not a single good one in the lot -- everything is underexposed, or out of focus, or any number of countless amateur mistakes that continue to ruin my photos now and then.