Humor!

TOP is on hiatus right now, but you have to check out this funny graphic. True? Thanks to mathewdh for passing this along.

I've posted a bunch of new comments, some very late (sorry...), including several about the London meeting with Ctein.

Mike

Comments

[Herman]

That's why I still use a medium format rollfilm camera. Same results with a lot less editing.

[Steve G]

I don't know if this applies to everyone, but if I got 6 'Awesomes' from a 36 exposure roll of 35mm, that counted as a very special day...

Steve

[Mike]

Funny, though being British I would have used the word 'good' instead of 'awesome', which I believe means the same.

[John Camp]

You hiatus seems to be leaking.

[Moose]

"True?"

No

[Marcelo Guarini]

The funny graphic tells a sad true, not only related to photography. The availability of almost free bits and baud rate to anyone, plagues the web of nonsense garbage each day, with a rate much higher than 2000/6.

[Arg]

Not true!

"6 are awesome" from the SD card might be true enough, but 6 being awesome from the 12 or 36 emulsion exposures is ridiculous. Most of them aren't even going to be well focused or decently exposed!

[Bernard]

I always thought that this joke should start with a single sheet of large format film and caption "1 exposure, 6 are Awesome!"
;)

[Walter Glover]

Almost, but not quite for me. Where is the Gracmatic with just 6 exposures - OR the double dark with only 2 ... or possibly only 1 exposure?
Kids these days can't recall anything prior to Sesame Street!

[Sal Santamaura]

...True?...

Nah, there were never that many "awesome" exposures on any of those media types. Also, it skipped sheet film, where one's "awesome" ratio is even lower. :-)

[Benjamin Marks]

Ha. Untrue. But sometimes it feels true. My ratio was never better than 3 out of 36 keepers anyway. That ratio has held steady, but I am taking several thousand pictures a year. I usually finish with about 200 that are worth showing to others, and between five and 12 that I am really proud of. The "really proud" number tends to decrease with time, though, as I reassess, reassess, reassess . . . and then sometimes get bored. The ones I can stand after five years, I'd stack against anyone's photos.

[Tom Burke]

In my case, 6 out of 36 might have been OK. Maybe. 6 'Awesome' took way more than 36 exposures.

(Depending on your assessment of awesome, of course.)

[Rick]

Funny? No - true!

[Soeren Engelbrecht]

Very true, I find from my experience. Whenever I shoot film, my keeper rate tends to be much higher. As an example, a few years ago, we went to China for ten days. I took 57 B/W pictures with my M3 and a 28 mm lens, and 22 of those now make up a small gallery:

http://www.imagepro.dk/China_2012/

I also took some hundred digital pictures, of course, but that gallery somehow contains the pictures that matter the most to me.

[Graham Byrnes]

... which wouldn't matter, if the photographer would do the work of editing down to the 6 rather than throwing them all at the world...

[Jack]

I wonder if the digital media contains the claimed six "awesome" images among the 2,000 exposures.

The trend towards thoughtless, rapid-fire shooting may reduce the randomness of "awesome" images more than many would like to think.

Perhaps I'm a poor judge of this, however, as I've exposed 2,000 images in each of the two film formats without stumbling on even six "awesome" images.

YMMV

Cheers

[Derek]

Nice. As others have noted, I would have been very, very happy if I had ever had six "awesome" pictures on a single roll of 120 (or 220!), or 35 mm film. However, questionable statistics aside, it does raise some interesting corollary questions: What are the differences between the six awesome pictures obtained from each medium? And, more importantly, do those differences matter to you as a photographer? It seems pretty clear that the three sets of good pictures could likely be of very different things due to the way each medium requires one to work. So, I guess it's just the old "horses for courses" adage again.

[Joseph Brunjes]

I can only imagine the pressure Steve McCurry must have felt when he was asked to shoot the last roll of Kodachrome. 30 of the frames are on his website:
http://stevemccurry.com/galleries/last-roll-kodachrome

[Peter]

"1 or 2 are awesome" for each is closer to the truth for me