Inclusive vs Exclusive

For most of my life as a photographer, which I think is probably most of my life, I've parroted the concept that more is better: that the more shots you fire off, the higher the probability that something good will get caught. But in practice, I've taken almost exactly the opposite approach. That is until about 1992, when I put the Leica away, concentrated on raising kids, learning how to manage computer systems and helping keep the household together. After that hiatus I started shooting again, and without realizing it began taking many more pictures than I had in the past. I'm still stunningly non-prolific. If I'm to believe what I hear from other photographers, my average annual output of about 4500 frames over the past six years is a joke, but it's a lot for me and I feel as if I've moved into a new era - that I've still got something , and that all of what I've accomplished isn't in the past.


But... In the last couple of weeks I've received requests for the use of some of my pictures in one-off publications (that almost needless to say pay no money to anybody and most likely lose money for the heroic people who publish them). A bunch of these are from my pre-1990 career, which means I have to figure out where the negatives are and rescan them to sufficient quality for print. What's been shocking is the realization of just how little I really was shooting back then. Even during the years when I felt like I was shooting my ass off, I was barely exposing 3000 frames a year. Many years it looks like I was shooting maybe 1500-2000. Something like 30-40 rolls of film. In the past 6 years I've shot more film than I did in the first 20 years I worked. Yet time and again, it's the work from the earlier period that gets the most attention. On my Flickr site, only 176 out 829 pictures pre-date 2004, yet 13 of the top 20 images in terms of "favorites" are from this group. This begs any number of questions for me, but the chief one is whether I've been going about it all wrong for the past several years.