I crop photos taken through a microscope because of space considerations when publishing the image.

But I have not cropped my other photos except where I was encouraged to do so on an A&P post (beaver activity).

I usually make 5-10 A4 workprints on an HP Laserjet on ordinary laser paper and stick them on the wall, then throw them away one by one. Time – maybe 5 minutes max to make them. I don’t mind losing colour and fine details – I think it helps concentrate on composition and people’s expressions.

You’re right to challenge my generalization, and I didn’t mean to say it was intrinsic to the format. I am speaking about my own process.

There is a deep and rich tradition to your method, and I would never say to abandon it. But I am usually pushing myself to another level. If I find myself thinking about the shot, composing it and putting this piece there that there, then I’ve missed it. Even in landscape work. I’m trying to get something in me to respond that is deeper and smarter than the piece of me that thinks it knows what the picture is.

My background as a commercial shooter has affected my process as well. I remember, early in my assisting career, working for Bob Peterson, who had shot for Life Magazine. I was astounded at how casually he would go through 20-30 rolls of film in a day. The results were brilliant. Then there’s the cautionary example of Garry Winogrand who died with, what, 2000 rolls of film undeveloped?

I have a somewhat similar process in painting — so I have an enormous collection of bad paintings that sometimes I can scrap in order to re-use the support. It’s harder, of course, in painting, in that it takes longer to produce one.

But I focused on your problem with digital photos. I wonder if you couldn’t do the quick and dirty Microsoft Picture Manager sort of work prints. With a decent paper, you can churn out quite a few that are of course inadequate but able to be assessed in your usual manner, at least in some terms — composition, line, forms, rhythms, etc. Then after living with the quick-and-dirty work prints, you can narrow the field further and do the more complex real work in Photoshop or whatever.

In any case, the world seems to divide itself on just these grounds: abundance and then cull out the very best, or careful slow ordering of process and tools and elements before proceeding. I find both kinds of advice in painting books, although if you are working in an atelier with lots of apprentices and grand historical scenes featuring a cast of thousands, I suspect that preliminary work is rather essential.

I’m going to challenge your generalization about 35mm digital photographers. My picture-taking style is very different from yours. To me, immersion-in-the-moment is definitely important, but it mostly takes place without a camera intervening between me and the subject. When I’ve identified a potential subject and given at least some consideration to what I care about in it, then I engage it through the camera. This entails further looking as I examine compositions, but I’m not clicking away through that process. Typically, I will not take more than 3-5 views of a given subject.

Everyone works differently, of course, but I suspect that some photographers with less-developed eyes than yours would do better to be more thoughtful at capture time. No matter how many frames are shot, the fraction of interesting ones can be vanishingly small.

The second is your philosophy of reviewing work long after they have been shot… I sort of engage in this when I paint. I usually paint from photographs and I have collection of ‘potential’ images that I hope to paint one day. If I find an image or a photo today, I tend to store it and look at it about a month of two later to see how best the image fits into my paint ‘set’. I have noticed that images of faces that I am excited about on acquiring lose their allure and meaning when I look back to the same a couple of months down the line (and vice versa of course – things that did not get me excited but I still stored away acquire new meanings and stories for me when I ‘find’ them down the line)…
Great post.