Tim Grey’s Blog

Sometimes I even scare myself.

In April I went to Japan for a week, and as usual I captured a lot of photos. As you might have guessed I love photography. I love taking pictures. And as I’ve said before, I would probably even take pictures if I didn’t have a CompactFlash card in my camera. But I’ll admit, even this is ridiculous.

You see, after spending a week in Japan I decided to perform a bit of math (I’m such a geek) to figure out the rate at which I was capturing pictures. I was shocked.

To get the full impact I decided I needed to calculate based on “waking hours”. I mean, it really wasn’t fair to include the hours I was sleeping when calculating the rate at which I was capturing photos. So over the course of the week I was in Japan I calculated that I captured one photo for every 1.9 minutes I was awake. Wow! That’s crazy! So I decided I’d mitigate it by calculating based on all the time I was actually on the ground in Japan. It turns out that meant I captured a photo every 3.28 minutes including time I spent sleeping.

I know I have quite the trigger finger, but I was still surprised at these statistics. I guess I didn’t realize I had this level of addiction to photography. That’s a lot of photos! I walked around a lot in Japan, but still, do you think there were things that interesting that I could capture a photo every 1.8 minutes? Obviously there was!

In fairness, this was split between my digital SLR and my point-and-shoot digital camera. I would try to be selective about which shots deserved to be captured in RAW by my digital SLR and which were really just snapshots. But that still translated into 1,081 RAW captures with my digital SLR, which calculates to one RAW capture every 5.1 minutes I was awake, or one RAW capture every 8.1 minutes I was on the ground in Japan.

What really struck me about this experience (besides the realization that I have a serious photography addiction) is that digital removes all barriers when it comes to photography. I remember in the “film days” how I would be so careful about how many images I would capture, because I didn’t want to waste film. Now I don’t feel that constraint, and instead tend to capture as many images as I possibly can. That introduces its own challenges, but it also allows for much more creative expression, and a much greater chance that I’ll actually end up with the photo I was hoping for. It also means I’ll experiment a lot more without concerns of “wasting film”.

So while it might seem a bit crazy that I captured so many photos during one week in Japan, it also represents one of the many advantages of digital photography. For all intents and purposes I had an unlimited supply of “film”, so I could focus on trying to get the best images possible without worrying about the resources available to me. In my mind, that’s a huge advantage of digital.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Philosophical, Photography, Digital. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.