In the film days, I used to hand-load TMax 400, buy bulk 'press-packs' at a discount, and only ever print contact sheets. Pro-labs tended to give better prices than consumer labs. We were also among the first to move to Kodak Photo CD. All this meant that I was able to shoot a whole roll of film per subject can still only be paying 5-10x what amateurs were paying for a roll of single-shot images.

Something that someone taught me very early on was that it's a lot cheaper to shoot a roll on one subject than to have to set the situation up again, or travel to the place, even for moments which could be recreated later.

With film I actually tended to shoot more because you were never quite sure that it had worked. I would bracket everything if there was any question about the light (and that was manual bracketing on a fully manual camera), and take dozens of shots if there was any question about the shutter speed. With digital, you can check the back of the camera and know that you've got it — or not.

Like everyone, I now shoot far more, but I shoot in a different way. I don't take two bodies with me and capture every shot twice in case one body malfunctions, and I don't have to bracket for exposure unless I'm planning to do HDR.

As someone else pointed out, the quality requirements are now much higher. For an advertising shot that involves models, getting the expression absolutely right means doing a lot of shooting. If you go back to ads from thirty years ago, the facial expressions were usually much plainer than today, and models were generally in more standard poses.

The key thing for me is being able to review images quickly afterwards. If you can't choose between your images, then there is no point shooting them. I used iView Media for a long time, but moved away from it when Microsoft took it on and started bundling it with Office products. I went to Lightroom, but found it very slow. Now Phase One have bought it, I'm back with Media Pro, which integrates well with Capture One, and is very, very fast. I can scan through a thousand images quicker than I could with contact sheets.

M A R T I N • T U R N E R
http://art.martinturner.org.uk
http://www.martinturner.org.uk

Nikonians membership: my most important photographic investment, after the camera

My Nikonians blog, Learning from the Portrait Masters, http://blog.nikonians.org/martin_turner/