When you are taking pictures are you shooting enough images of each pose? I have the privilege of seeing a lot of AMAZING images that people bring to me to print. I have seen pictures from just about all the local photographers and many national and international photographers. I have to say that some of these pictures are beyond amazing! One thing that I am seeing more and more with photographers is the lack of shots of various poses, a photographer will set up an amazing photo making sure everyone looks perfect and that the lighting is perfect then they will only shoot one or two images of that pose. Now in reality there is nothing at all wrong with that, it is the way we did it when we shot film, we did not have the freedom to shoot 5 or 10 pictures of each pose so we would only shoot one or two. But with digital it costs no more than a few seconds to fire off a couple extra frames of each pose. Now before I go further I am not talking about setting your drive to warp speed and taking 200 images of every pose, that is going to the extreme the other way. What I am talking about is taking 4, 5 or even 10 pictures (if you have a large group) to make sure that you get perfect expressions.
Last week I had a lady bring me in her daughters images on DVD as she wanted some prints. To say that they were good is an understatement, the worst ones on this disk were better than 99% of photographers best images – I would have loved to add any of these images to my portfolio except for one thing. The posing was perfect (ZERO room for improvement), lighting was amazing (On the entire disk I saw 1 with lighting that was not 100% perfect), lens selection was fantastic and the expressions were okay – and this is where the problems were. Just about every image the expressions were off, like the people were caught before they had a chance to smile or they were caught just after smiling, and the worst part was that for each amazing pose there was only one image to choose from. Every picture that this lady wanted printed she asked “Is there one with better expressions?” And there was not. It was sad seeing this as I know that a couple more images shot of each pose and they would have been 100% perfect, and the prints would have been amazing.
This is not an isolated case as the same day I got to see another photographers work that was also great. The client had over 100 images to select from but there was only around 25 images in total, the photographer made a B&W, a sepia, color and a color with reduced saturation of each image. So the client kept asking me if there were better smiles and I had to say that sorry they only had 25 images from a huge family shoot to chose from and the rest were the same just different colors.
This is also something in shooting nature images that I see a lot. A photographer goes out and finds the perfect location for a picture then waits and waits for the perfect lighting to happen and they only shoot one or two images before moving one. If you have taken the time to do all this why not try different angles, lenses, crops and exposure settings instead of only a couple images.
Again don’t go overboard when doing this but make sure that you are getting a selection from weddings, families, nature and wildlife so you get the best image possible!