Milk the cow a lot

“It’s seldom you make a great picture. You have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.”

- Henri Cartier Bresson

What a great quote. I first heard it in this video. I was on the sofa down in my South London apartment late in the evening. This video left such an impact on me that I listen to it almost every time I go taking some street photos.

But this piece isn’t about the video (though you should watch it). It’s about my experience with the quantity/quality trade-off in photography, and the basic thinking that helps turn quantity into quality.

And clearly this is written from a perspective of a certain kind of photography.

Remember nothing is set in stone - there are no rules.

Digital Instincts

For context, I started my photography journey around 2019–2020. It was all digital photography, and with that came the ability to shoot to my heart’s content. That had the unwanted side-effect of having to spend an absolute ton of time trimming down the photos in Lightroom.

I hated that process.

"The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a millimeter."

- Henri Cartier Bresson

Insightful as always, Henri.

In street photography, I used to burst-shot 6-ish frames just to get the right leg position and overall placement of a person in the frame. That was important. But, think about the fact that to get the right frame you might have to wait and see say 15 people walking by which is 90 photos! And, clearly those are rookie numbers for some of the more trigger happy folks. If I dig out my photos catalog from some rave events I did, I would get thousands of photos per event.

Anyway, while looking at the photos with millimeters of difference between elements, I learned how to tell what I liked. Very quickly you realise a simple truth:

If you have to pick which one to delete, you really start to focus on the why behind your choices.

But there's only so much to gain from having to sift through quantities of photos that have minimal differences. At some point picking out the right leg pose on a man crossing the street from 58 photos gets really old.

I soon had a bigger problem on my hands. Even when the feet were spot on at the millimeter resolution, the photo still didn't make me feel anything. Don't get me wrong - there is a certain high in getting these basics down.

And over time those basics don’t lose their importance - when you learn about them, you raise your bar. Treat 'getting the positions in the right place' as level 1 of respecting the millimeters of your photography. This goes hand in hand with looking at your photos and being honest about when something is off, even more so when you've taken 58 shots - be picky!

Be productive with this afforded quantity. If you have to pick between two almost identical images you will have to find the deciding factor that will tilt the scale one way or the other and don't shy away from discarding things that don't get the basics right.

If you don't know the basics, go learn about them. More on that later.

In summary, exercise that muscle of letting go of photos that don't fulfill the higher bar in an honest way so that you can get better. Don't lie to yourself and keep tons of shots that aren't moving you in the direction of getting better images. And make sure to learn by dissecting your own images and optimising your process so that you have to spend less time trimming and more time taking photos.

Most importantly take more images with this new knowledge and try to get the millimeters right in the moment and not afterwards - you control when the camera fires. Use burst if you have to, but control the data you collect.

Beyond the first hurdles

The above shot is an example of a shot where I was 'fishing' in the area and then when the right person was walking by I was 'spraying and praying'.

With what I now know after some time learning about photography, I can introspect into what is wrong in this image as I see it. I think it's not nailed, and that isn't due to some minute differences in leg posture, hence the burst didn't help. It's more to do with the meaning of what I come to interpret from the quote by Bresson we looked at before.

Beyond the baseline expectations I've set for my photos about leg position, singularity of subject, clean lines etc, you have to see the composition in the scene and know why the non-obvious differences in millimeters will make a difference.

The above image doesn't work because I wasn't in the right position to improve the subject background separation; their cloak overlaps the rectangle of the exit to the tunnel by millimeters and I didn't have the understanding of composition and pre-visualisation.

So it doesn't matter that I had 15+ shots of this person passing by. I wasn't thinking about anything beyond what Instagram photography taught me and so I wasn't rewarded with the pinnacle this scene had to offer to my current photographic incarnation.

My fault.

Not all thinking of this manner has to be long-term thinking. Some situations are hunting situations, you can't just nicely frame something up and think it through, you have the blink of an eye to compose and nail it.

But if I couldn't get a usable shot out of the above photo, how could I have ever captured a split second moment with the right composition in a different situation.

Alright, but how do you know to look at the separation of the cloak and the background, I mentioned learning the basics. If you don't wanna pay someone to teach you this, then look at photobooks, YouTube or websites. Look at your photos, but even more importantly the photos and works of masters, works that someone else is doing and that inspire you - look for things that show you what is possible with attention to detail.

To get some vocabulary to be able to talk about it all, read some books (I recommend as a baseline something like this).

If you want to see how other people work and how their process allows them to nail the millimeters, but also 'milk the cow enough' a.k.a. work the scene, then something like Magnum Contact Sheets is great inspiration.

It might feel like nothing is happening, but keep exposing yourself to this, something is forming. Combine it with the striving for a good baseline in camera, being ruthless with selecting and discarding and you should see some progress over time.

Again, the key here is that hopefully you strive for the point at which you have stopped clicking the shutter just because you can and have been clicking it because you must, knowing that otherwise the leg position will be wrong and there won't be enough diagonals to make the composition interesting - you started looking beyond the basic shoot trigger and what's expected.

This care and attention is my minimum expectation, after all, if you ask me to look at your photo, I will tell you all of this anyway.

Carnival of constraints

Also known as 'shooting film'.

Previously, I've mentioned Magnum Contact Sheets. It illustrates a similar need to edit down and select photos, but most (all?) of it's content is done on film.

Just so we're clear, what this section is about is not exclusive to film, but it sure helps not to leave the constraints you uphold solely to your own willpower. In other words, sometimes it's nice to be constrained by means outside of your control.

Anyway, the book is about the somewhat lost art of contact sheets. But really, to me it's about having to 'work the scene' and to get the right image before running out of film or the moment is relegated to the one eternal moment.

The equally important follow-up is having to look at your images after they’re developed. In general the film process is so constraining and time consuming if you want total creative control. But clearly, it has produced immense images even with such harsh constraints.

You spend time with them in the darkroom or with your scans and, by nature, stare at their ups and downs and have time to assess in detail the trade-offs you made to take that one frame. Maybe there's a leg here that you wish was out of frame, but it was a fast moving scene and your last frame in the roll, so you couldn't get anything else.

And so, I think these and other film constraints really pushed me to be better at the time of taking an image and slow down and process images afterwards. This is not to say that you need to do film when you're learning what ISO is, but there is a time when swapping over to having more constraints might be helpful for some.

Since adopting film as a main medium I noticed that the attention to detail for me increased drastically. I spend more time considering in a split of an instant whether to press the shutter or whether in 250ms the subjects feet are going to be better and their head not as cut off by the background, but maybe that's less about the innate flavor of film and more about the price of it.

When you take only film out for your street photo walk, you have less to work with, it's tougher. But it teaches me patience and has synergised with the same muscles I developed trimming my dumb attempts in Lightroom.

I do not want to click the shutter on a whim and do want to strive for something that I won't have to 'delete', even if I inevitably fail to achieve that.

Overall, I argue that 'work at a lower framerate' should be explored somehow at some point of your creative development in order to become a better photographer. And an 'easy' way to do this is to subscribe to limitations of a limited medium.

On OK

All of that is nice.

But let's face it, no matter how much you strive for learning and perfection, ultimately not everything you touch will turn to gold. You will have just OK images. You will have images where you think - "why did I even pick up my camera?". Yes it's good on the basics side, the composition is nice I don't notice any higher order problems, but there's nothing there. It's like you're chasing a photo of a ghoul.

If you've ever taken an image of a trashcan and later thought - "why did I do that?" - you'll know what I mean. That doesn’t go away. It changes.

For me, basic tropes revealed themselves as such (looking at you people crossing street) and for them to work they have to add something while having the basic quality standard upheld.

Also, some deliberate compromise is OK. After all:

“It’s seldom you make a great picture...".

- Henri Cartier Bresson

And not to say that weirdness and blurriness is not allowed as intentional additions and/or deliberate compromises. But make sure any detail is serving to enhance the image or at least not compromise it, even if it's a fairly basic idea or cliche.

So here's a crucial bit of food for thought:

When looking at the work of masters you don't see the things they don't want you to see.

Their failed prints, muddled subject background separation and images that have nothing in them. And yet they have such great portfolios, portfolios that you can read for hours, visually digesting it all.

And so by being picky, by looking at tons of your images and being embarrassed about the silly mistakes you've made and by learning from them, you are slowly starting to see a way forward paved with work that nobody ever has to see. It's OK to get 1 usable image from hundreds, as long as it's teaching you.

Summary

This is how you move across the tightrope from quantity to quality.

• Learn to read your own images. Cull hard (even if only mentally). If you can’t explain why an image stays, it probably shouldn’t.

• Raise a minimum bar (composition, subject separation, timing). Only break it when the break adds something. Don’t compromise out of laziness.

• Don’t confuse shutter activity with progress. Burst is fine, but it’s not a substitute for being in the right position and actually seeing the scene.

• Study what “millimeters” means in practice: background intersections, edges, overlaps, and the small stuff that quietly kills a frame.

• Use constraints on purpose (film, a frame limit, one focal length, no burst, whatever). “Lower framerate” forces intention and makes you pay attention.

• Accept “OK” as part of the pipeline. Masters have mountains of misses — you just never see them. Your job is to build the edit that hides the junk and keeps the learning.

Milk the cow. Make the cheese. Throw most of it away. That’s the job.

- Art