The equation for Keeper rate: Time spent at a location is directly proportional to the quality of images.
I have an equation for good images:
Time spent at a location is directly proportional to the quality of photographs of that location
Time is a luxury item, especially when it comes to travel photography. I will go one step further and submit that time is not only the most expensive piece of essential photographic equipment, but it also might be the most important one. Recently, this became evident when I spent eight days in Venice around New Years’. It was a family trip. During such trips, I head out to make images an hour before sunrise and spend about three hours wandering around and taking photos. This approach of spending more time at one location does limit the photographic opportunities. However, in the universe with limitless image-making possibilities, we are bound to miss almost all of them anyways. This schedule works well. We also tend to stay at one place longer instead of trying to see and do everything possible, crammed into one trip. Extra time at one place means that I often have the luxury of returning to one place more than once if I want to. If, any day, the gods of photography are not kind and nothing works, I am not bothered by it. In this sense, time spent at one place becomes the most crucial ingredient of successful images — the keepers. What are “keepers”?
Keepers. A photographer’s term for photographs we like enough to keep them in our permanent files and print them.
-Alain Briot (https://luminous-landscape.com/keepers/)
In his blog post, David duChemin recently discussed this formulation — that time allows a photographer to make stronger images.
The more time you make for whatever you’re photographing, the more possibilities you have.
-David duChemin (https://davidduchemin.com/2021/11/for-stronger-photographs-more-time/)
When I went to Venice, I made a mental note of making one good panoramic image of Venice’s famous view from the Accademia bridge. I was under no illusions that it would be unique, but I wanted to do this to have my image. This desire meant that if I wanted to make an image more than a travel snapshot, I needed something special from the environment to have some feel and emotion in the picture. In particular, I wanted to make images in fog and moody lighting. To effectively capture a scene, I needed the goldilocks of these conditions where fog required to be there, but not so much that it would obscure the buildings. There were technical issues to consider: camera speed that is enough to register the boats, but not so fast that it would freeze all the motion and require higher ISO and introduce more noise. Choice of lens mattered too. I wanted a panorama with a telephoto lens to compress the perspective and have more visible details instead of using a 17mm Tilt-Shift lens.
Furthermore, such conditions meant exposure calculations, and there is nothing better than a reliable spot-meter for exposure zone assignment. It also meant I needed a tripod. All of these thoughts determined my choice of camera, lens, exposure setting, and support.
Pre-visualization determines the choice of camera, the lens, exposure, camera-support, and exposure calculation tool
But the essential equipment is TIME: environmental conditions need to be suitable for the vision of that image. Otherwise, even the best possible tools will only produce a mediocre and uninteresting image.
Thus started my early morning walks to this spot, hauling my equipment. I went to this spot, rushing past several other image-making opportunities on four consecutive days.
Now, these daily visits to the Accademia bridge for one image may not sound like much, but consider this, not many tourists even stay overnight in Venice, which has dramatically changed for the worse during the pandemic.
In 2020, there were 2.3 million overnight stays in Venice compared with thirty-million overnight stays in 2019.
Every day, I woke up a couple of hours before the sunrise, got ready, and arrived at this spot. The fog was dense each morning, and I could only see the building next to the bridge and not much else. I dutifully made some exposures, but they could have been mistaken for any image of a boat in dense fog as nothing in the background was visible. On the fourth day, the fog was quite thick yet again. However, I saw that sky was slightly clearer than the previous three mornings on my way there. I decide to wait. To keep me warm, I walked from one bank of the canal to the other a few times. Suddenly I noticed the outline of the buildings. I set up my camera waited. The fog thickened and visibly became even less. I took the camera off the tripod, packed my light meter, and was about to change the lens on my camera when I noticed that fog had cleared up.
I could see the scene that I have come to associate with Venice! I hurriedly took the meter reading, put the camera back on the tripod, and made a test image. It was horrible. I re-measured the light, calculated the zones, placed the highlight on zone 7, and clicked the shutter. Terrible blown-out photo again. Perplexed, I looked at the scene again and checked the meter reading again. It turned out that instead of the spot metering, incident light meter mode was on! Anyways, I fixed that, took a series of “correctly” exposed images. Finally, I was happy with the set of pictures from that morning! Following is the result:
Venice on a foggy December morning
Time is an elusive piece of equipment. When we think about gear and equipment, we mostly imagine a new lens, a camera body, or a lighting tool. Most artisans or technicians long for new tools to achieve their artistic vision or technical tasks. When the pace of development of newer — even if not substantially better — tools is slow, it is not a significant issue. For example, in the decades past, once someone saved for and purchased a Hasselblad or a Linhof modular film camera, the next lust-worthy items were lenses or dark-room tools. These tools — modular camera bodies and lenses — did not produce a newer model each year. These specialized artisanal tools required practice and were cumbersome to use, and the whole process was such that few genuinely dedicated individuals purchased them. In relative terms, these were expensive and out of the reach of most. Professionals — those who made money with their art or technical products — were a select few. This pace of gear acquisition all changed once we entered the brave new digital age.
Once the digital revolution started, image-making became increasingly more straightforward and accessible. This democratization of content creation, coupled with the internet revolution, was a perfect fit for our content-obsessed social media platforms. It has had a paradoxical effect on image creators. On the one hand, our reach has exponentially increased (for example, anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection and knowing where to look can access this blog post). Still, on the other hand, the reduced attention span of the audience, along with the enormous volume of images produced of varying quality, has made it exceedingly difficult to capture attention. Those whose livelihoods or sense of self depends on the reach of their content are thus caught in this almost constant struggle to go viral or grow their social media following or page clicks. This desire for the expanded audience means that they need to find niches and have a distinct style (not a new requirement), i.e., answer: what is your differentiator?
What is your brand differentiator?
The answer to this question has bedeviled individuals and corporations alike. Individual artists such as photographers and their brands can stand apart by creating superior quality images and sharing them with the right target audience. If they can spend more time with their subject, it is more likely to result in more original work and avoid derivative work. We should consider time as a tool that we can use to be our differentiator. The more time we spend at one place, the more intimately we get to know the place or the subject. Allocating more time to a subject also means finding photographic opportunities in spots that might not be in exotic locations but in locations that are accessible to us.
