The Seductive Pitfalls of Bad Photography Advice
Taking fewer photos, quitting Instagram, portrait lighting, making versus taking images, and more dubious advice dissected.
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Everyone in photography has an opinion. Anywhere you find photographers, from TikTok to Substack, you’ll find advice on how to better your work. Some of it is insightful, most harmless. But a handful of ideas have become so entrenched that they’ve achieved an irritating kind of immortality. Repeated as photographic gospel, these are the ones I find the most counterproductive. Consider this as another individual viewpoint, take it or leave it.
Taking Fewer Photos / Slowing Down
Photographing with intent and taking fewer photos (either by shooting film or using a camera with manual focus) often get conflated, but they’re not the same. When I teach, I advocate for shooting with intent while encouraging students to shoot a lot, make many mistakes and never let equipment limit them. So why does the Spartan idea of taking fewer photos seem more romantic than overshooting? And who really benefits from slowing down?
For photographers who fire a thousand identical frames in five minutes, this advice makes sense. You know one when you hear it, an indiscriminate firing-squad, often directed at an object that does not need any redundancy. But for documentary or portrait work, photographing less is a surefire way to miss great images.
Intent isn’t just about pressing the shutter. It’s everything before, during, and after the shoot. I’ll often photograph scenes that feel trivial, only to discover during the edit that the throwaway frame is the main event. That’s not an accident or a lack of intent, it’s the result of arriving with ideas that work in the background and crystallize during the edit.