I will never forget taking my first images with my first camera. I was 16 and so excited to see what I might produce with the new tool I had spent a month of my modest teenage earnings on.

I will also never forget what it was like to get those early images back (this was in the days of film), reviewing them and experiencing a unique emotional blend of both wonder and despair.

What I did not know at that time, was that I would endure that mix of emotions almost every time I reviewed images from any photographic session. This was to be my experience, for not weeks or months—but years of my life. It was so daunting, in fact, that I quit taking photographs multiple times. And I think it’s why a lot of beginner photographers quit. Becoming frustrated, disenchanted, and disappointed with my images caused me to stop making them. And it was only after multi-month or multi-year breaks that I would come back to photography.

However, in my experience, it was those years of frustration and poor results that eventually created the conditions for me to produce photographs I was happy with. So, it’s ironic that the very process I found frustrating was the same process that helped me get where I wanted to go. Perhaps this seems transparently obvious to you, but it certainly wasn’t to me.

Let me tell you a two-paragraph story. It’s related, I promise. I was a fitness instructor for a number of years, and something I would see my clients often frustrated with was the slow speed of their progress. Sometimes, this was due to diet or genetics, but often, it was something else: volume of training.

The clients that progressed the slowest were usually the ones who spent the least amount of time training. The ones who excelled and broke their own records week after week and month after month were the people who we saw in the gym multiple times every week. The direct correlation of how much time people spent working out and how they progressed, became quite obvious to me.

Volume Matters

Similarly, what I came to understand about becoming a better photographer was that I needed to forget about the quality of the individual photographs. I needed to let go of them being good or bad or being pleased or displeased with them. What I needed to do was simply focus on producing more of them. Going out with my camera more often, shooting as much as I could. This isn’t to say that I stopped trying to take photos I enjoyed; quite the opposite, in fact. But the focus turned from one of results to one of process. And that changed everything for me. So, in my experience, volume matters. You need repetition after repetition. Year after year. And the more of it you do, the shorter amount of time you do it in, the faster you will progress.

That has been my experience anyway. I hope that was helpful. Take care.