(Or "photographing," if you object to the verb "shooting." Shooting to me means the act of handling a camera to actively take pictures, whereas photographing is a slightly broader term. But it's up to you.)

Check out this comment from yesterday, by Paul Parker (here are some of Paul's pictures):

Shooting and editing require completely different mindsets. If you're editing whilst shooting you just ain't in the zone. You've got to "let go." It's exactly the same in all arts. It's improvisation, where you're at one with your tools and voice. Mistakes don't matter because you're shooting from the gut. It's very primeval. If you can't be bothered to edit 1,000 images to find one—yes, one—amazing image, you might as well try another hobby. It's takes hard work to get a consistent and defined 'voice' in the arts, be it in music, painting, photography or whatever.

You see, in many ways Saturday's essay by Mike leads on from the "One year with one camera and one lens" post from a couple of years ago [The Leica as Teacher —Ed.]. To get in to the zone requires being at one with your tools—or, at the very least, they shouldn't get in your way. So if you're switching between cameras and lenses all the time (and let's not forget switching film if you're still using it), then pure, undiluted inspiration can be quite hard. There's a reason why Bruce Davidson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden, Joel Meyerowitz, Anders Petersen, Garry Winogrand—and I could go on and on—generally use, or used, the same camera/lens combination. Or we can go further back to those two books Mike mentioned years ago, Zen in the Art of Archery and The Tao Te Ching. Do yourself a favor and read them both twenty times until you really understand them. It took me two weeks whilst stuck in hospital to finally see the light; I read them day and night.

I feel I've been very lucky in that I've met a couple of Magnum photographers and sat down with them and spoken to them—a little about photography, and a lot about life. Richard Kalvar explained to me how he usually shot around about 800 images per day on an assignment. Joseph Koudelka told me it was pretty true he would shoot four rolls a film every day just to keep fit. David Alan Harvey has been known to shoot for hours nonstop, in the zone, pushing on, even though he thought he probably had the shot. You never know when inspiration and luck can strike.

This idea of different mindsets is a subject I've thought a lot about over the years, but have never written much about. I've sort of circled around it, warily, never quite confident of my ability to get it into words.

The basic insight is of the necessity in art to switch between two sometimes conflicting, sometimes opposite mindsets depending on which part of the process you're faced with. Switching between your artistic mode and your business mode, for instance. That's one example which a lot of us are familiar with.

It's why in a lot of endeavors there is a division of labor of some sort. Writers have (and need!) editors. Musicians have producers. Athletes have coaches. Apropos the first example above, successful commercial photographers are not infrequently husband-and-wife teams, where one spouse is the "creative" and the other handles the books and the bookings. This isn't necessarily the rule, but it's pretty common. Dancers have choreographers; actors in a stage play are bringing to life the words written by the playwright following the direction of the director. And so on.

It's because the necessary tasks require opposing mindsets, and people who have one aptitude sometimes don't have the other. The writer must be free to let the thoughts flow, and it's easier to do that if she knows she has an editor in her corner who will back her up and help shape the finished work into polished coherence later.

I noticed that my film photography required two quite different mindsets. When I was editing my work, I'd be very careful, slow, contemplative, and deliberate, and when printing it I'd be patient and persistent, always working until it seemed just right. And yet these virtues didn't serve me very well when I was out shooting—then I seemed to need opposite virtues: quickness, openness, a sort of impulsive reactivity, and the ability to know "in a flash" when to pursue a picture and when not to—that is, to recognize when I was on the trail of something promising. To "fire away" when needed, and to trust when the instant was exactly right to press the shutter button.

I'm personally better at the first-mentioned virtues—the ones that came into play when editing, and when crafting a print—that I am at the latter. I can't tell you how many times I've watched a great shot in my viewfinder in a sort of enthralled state over what I'm seeing, only to wait too long to shoot. Sometimes, in clumsy overcompensation, I'll try too hard to shoot quickly and loosely, such that I become sloppy and insufficiently attentive. Only when I have a rich situation and shoot a lot, concentrating hard, do I overcome my natural deliberateness. I said yesterday that I shoot lightly, but I often shoot too lightly, and don't give myself enough to choose from later. And yet trying to compensate for this sometimes gives me trouble too, because I "scattershoot" and don't give each exposure acute attention.

It's like I should have two separate personalities, one for shooting and one for the rest of the craft. You need "chops" when shooting—physical and mental skills, honed with practice—and thoughtful judgment and craftsmanship for the rest of it.

I'm not going to go so far as to say there's any one right way to shoot. But Cartier-Bresson never edited or printed his own work—he was interested in "the hunt," in getting the shot, in being out on the street and going after what he was seeing; he didn't bother with the back-up work. (He didn't have to; most of us have to do everything for ourselves.) Consider magazine photographers or sports shooters—very often, the people doing the shooting are not the ones doing the editing, cropping, post-processing, and sequencing. As an "other way 'round" example, consider Doug Rickard, who made "his" work by carefully discovering pictures that worked from sifting through a raw mass of endless Google street views. The ones who often seem to balance the two sides the best are landscape and nature photographers, like Ansel Adams or Charlie Cramer.

I have no conclusion here. I'll defer to you to tell me what you think, and whether you've noticed it yourself.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Featured Comments from:

JK: "A monk in Tokyo once told me that a Zen photographer would have no need ever to put film into his camera. I'm pretty sure this was a gentle kind of joke, but one never knows with those fellows."

Steve L.: "If the question is 'does the artist have something to say?' and the way of getting there is, as Paul says, shooting 1000 images to find one amazing one, the answer is clearly 'no.'"

Mike replies: I don't think I can agree with you, Steve. Unfortunately many great photographs were taken by photographers whose work is otherwise little known or remembered. And I remember getting a tour of Magnum New York from Erich Hartmann, who showed me an archive room. In black notebooks were Cartier-Bresson's negatives and contacts, stretching out in long rows, and Erich told me that you can go through book after book before finding a single shot you recognize. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but 1,000 shots for one great one has been considered a reasonable bargain by many great photographers.

On the other hand, my old friend Jim used to work for an old-time pro who would go out to cover an event with a Speed Graphic and three holders (six shots, for those of you who've never used a 4x5 film holder), and Walker Evans once said that six pictures was a full day's work. One of the exercises I used to give my students was to snip off a small segment of film and load it carefully in their (35mm) cameras and go off and spend an hour shooting...with only the one single exposure. It's an interesting problem, and I think a good exercise.

Jim Richardson: "If I can add anything to Paul's comment it is that there can be many 'zones' to be in. This can depend on the job at hand. Certainly while I am shooting for a story I am in something of an 'editorial zone,' where I am thinking both about the subject and how it will be presented in a coherent story on the printed page. (You can bet I think about where the magazine gutter will fall on a picture that I hope will run as a double truck.) Both of those things are present in my mind while I have camera in hand.

"This is not a constraint! It is liberating. It helps me identify which subjects (from the plethora that the world presents every day) I can ignore. And by inference which subjects I need to pay excruciating attention to. This filtering is one of the necessary tools. It is how I get 'in the zone.' But it is by no means a simple existential zone. It is a very thoughtful zone, one highly structured and purpose driven. It's how I seek to elevate the imagery. Getting into the zone is important. Picking the right zone to get into is also important."