How Do You Translate Three Million Words to Photography?

Regarding Saul Bellow's advice that if you want to be a writer you need to write three million words, C.R. Marshall asked:

"Three million words...I wonder what that works out to in photographs. Anyone have any thoughts? (And don't give me the 'picture is worth a thousand words' calculations. That is information content, not learning content.)"

He didn't ask me specifically, so I hope he doesn't mind if I take to the bully pulpit and proffer my own answer.

The benefit of jogging (or walking) is best measured by the time you spend at it, not the distances you cover. In a similar way, I've always thought that effort at learning and becoming fluent at photography should be measured not in numbers of images, but in the amount of time—and the amount of attentiveness—you spend learning and practicing it. Because everyone shoots very differently, and really, in this day and age it's trivial to shoot huge numbers of images, barely even looking at them either when you take them or when you download them or when you review them or when you store them away. And how much good does that really do? It's become easier than ever to spin your wheels. What does it matter if you spend four hours spraying-and-praying a thousand "captures" you never even look at carefully, versus spending the same four hours looking carefully through the viewfinder and studying compositions and working your way around a few different subjects, but only actually taking 30 exposures? I might even argue that the latter could be better practice that you could learn more from. If it's mindfulness that counts, mindless shooting doesn't do you much good. Just shooting for numbers is a suspect concept.

The other aspect of looking at it from a time rather than numbers perspective is that you can incorporate a lot more types of learning into the evaluation. Let's say, for instance, that you want to do portraits. I'd argue that time spent looking at books of portrait paintings, time spent exploring the visual effects of different focal lengths, time spend researching how a specific photographer you admire lights his subjects, and time spent learning how to set your subject at ease and get the expressions you want from them are all just as important as making the actual pictures. Although of course I would never say that making the actual pictures isn't important too.

That number you wanted
My brother Scott rather colorfully says, when confronted with what he thinks is a made-up statistic, "you just pulled that number out of a monkey's butt." To name an actual number, my monkey-butt estimate would be that three million words would equal about 2,500 hours spent working on your photography. That's a year and a quarter of 40-hour work weeks, which seems about right. You could do that in anywhere from nine months (if you went full bore and slammed it hard for 70 hours a week) to maybe ten years (if you averaged roughly 40 minutes a day. That's a bit less than five hours a week, which seems reasonable even for someone with a family and a 9-to-5).

I'm basing that on a rough correlation to the amount of time it actually took me to get to three million words—about five to seven years, something like that—and how hard I worked at it during that time.

I've known of people who did 2,500 hours in less than a year. I also think that there are a lot of you in our audience who passed 2,500 hours long ago, just like I left three million words in the dust quite a ways back.

My eyes are buggin' me today, so I'm going to ramp it down.

If you have your own answer for C.R., though, I'll post comments.

Hope you Americans are enjoying your 4th of July weekend. The lakeshore is totally mobbed here in the beautiful Finger Lakes. Families, kids, and dogs everywhere. The lake road that passes by the porch where I work is a neverending parade.

Mike
(Thanks to C.R.)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bill Poole: "Fabulous Intensive Learning Method."

Mike replies: I got that.   ;-)

Paul: "It is a lot harder to write three million meaningless words than to take three million meaningless pictures. I think writing a lot will more commonly lead people towards some self discovery, but it isn't too difficult to take a few million pictures of your cat."

Moose: "Carl Jung remarked about his clinical psychiatry practice that averages are useless when dealing with individuals. It there's a smoking gun in my late wife's long ago demise, it's the use of averages at Kaiser Permanente (at least back then) to control costs. People that young hardly ever get bowel cancer, so another set of tests isn't justified yet. And yet—dead, likely due to late diagnosis when we finally went outside their system. Who can possibly know where Saul Bellow falls on the distribution curve of number of words written before commercial success? Likewise, I don't see to what actual use an individual can put numbers like Gladwell's and Bellow's. There are undoubtedly at least a couple of writers of top calibre who only wrote a few thousand words before becoming successful. There are certainly others who have written tens, even hundreds of millions of words without success notable outside their immediate circle, or just themselves. I am not saying that practice, practice and more practice is not a good way to become proficient, only that there are not meaningful numbers to tell any individual how much. (Note that I'm being intentionally careful about what success might mean. The ideas are valid, however it may be defined.)"

Comments

[Michael Perini]

Not sure who said it first, but I heard it first through Fred Picker.
My rough memory is something like this: "Everyone has 10,000 bad pictures in them, so the sooner you get through those, you'll get to the good ones"
It's not a monolithic 10k, you can get good ones in between but I found the the Idea helpful. ---as though the bad ones weren't totally useless if you keep at it. You have to keep at it though, if you lay off for 6 months, you start over.
If you stay with it and pay attention, you start eliminating common mistakes.
Like Mr. Bellow's advice,, it is a broad generalization but helpful because it stresses 'the Doing' of the thing you want to get better at.

I've told people that Looking at, talking or reading about Photography is different than Doing it. Those other things are good too, but they don't count against your doing.
Get out, make pictures, look at them critically, go make more.....
Do it until you please yourself.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

The 3 million word number seems excessive; but of course I don't know how much unpublished work most authors I admire did before they started publishing. The cases I do know, it's generally rather little; though it's also true that they improved after they started being published professionally. (And the number I remember is 1 million, and not from Bellow; but I can't find a source for it.)

Also "writing" comes in flavors just the way photographing does; does what I'm writing now count? Many people would say not, I imagine.

Also, I can't believe you published this without any reference to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours!

I'm a little afraid people are searching for the "magic key" that will unlock their creativity or their potential or something. You're not offering them that key, but desperately hopeful people are sometimes poor readers.

[John Camp]

This goes back to the "ten thousand hours of deliberate practice" to master a difficult skill. The idea was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books, based on other research. Ten thousand hours, at 40 hours a week, would be about five years. In music, I think the Gladwell book said that world-class violinists (?) couldn't practice more than about 23 (?) hours a week without losing focus, so that would be more like ten years for a hard-working musician to get to world-class status. "Deliberate practice" is a thing, a psychological term for mindful practice that focuses on weaknesses in performance, and not simply pounding away at what you already do well.

In my experience, that seems about right. My experience would come from observing people in law, medicine and journalism -- after getting the relevant degrees, it seems to take about five years of full-time work to get to the point where you're really motoring.

But, that involves relatively objective judgment (how many people you cure, how many cases you win, how few mistakes you make.) You really don't get that in personal or enthusiast photography, where it's mostly self-judgment; and not even really in most pro photography, where other skill sets are as important as the actual camera work (self-promotion, accounting, contacts, location, level of competition, etc.)

Might you get some level of objective analysis with photography clubs or other such organizations? Don't know.

[Juan Pablo]

This idea that a skill can be acquired with a certain amount of time or work is a very extended way of thinking. We live in a society that seeks general solutions (it is easier and cheaper) to particular problems, does not consider the great differences between people, we could think of it as a statistical approximation of the majority but in no case guarantees anything when we consider particular cases. This is even more inaccurate if what we evaluate is artistic work.

[James Bullard]

I've been at it for 61 years so I think I can safely say I passed your 'monkey butt' number long ago but I don't really believe it is about numbers.

The machine gun or spray gun approach works for action photographers because putting the camera on servo and pointing it where they know the action will occur allows them to get shots that the time lag between brain and fingertip doesn't allow.

If you are going for art though, you need intent, you need a mindful approach. I'm reminded of the famous monkey self portrait. Whose photo is that? The guy who owned the camera or the monkey? A lot of photos are the result of luck to some degree but when the result is entirely the result of luck, I'd be hesitant to lay claim to a credit line. I prefer that my photos reflect my intent.

[Steve Jacob]

While no doubt true in a general sense, the role of feedback should not be underestimated.

If you want to write professionally, then feedback from publishers, editors and readers is a major factor in honing your particular style, but it also tends to be coloured by the requirements of the genre.

As a hobby photographer, I found that getting constructive feedback was extremely hard. Random thumb ups on Flickr were not what I needed, but meeting other photographers and artists was often interesting because they could articulate what worked for them, and what didn't.

I have been involved with technical writing and report writing for 30 years. Everything I wrote was reviewed before reaching the clients, and would be scrutinised in minute detail by the same clients.

So I developed a style based on objective factual details, structured argument and clarity. This turns out to be incongruent with writing fiction.

[Mike Plews]

Lets say 3 million words would boil down to about 100,000 photographs (that monkey's butt is kind of warm). If those photos were done with an 8x10 view camera you would be in the tall cotton. If it were a DSLR you would be up with my neighbor Carl after a trip to Disney World.
It's complicated.

[Stephen S. Mack]

Always remember the Blind Squirrel School of Photography: even a blind squirrel can find a walnut every now and again...

[MHMG]

My guess is that over the last 50 years I've got close to 100,000 hours of time invested in learning about all things photography. Yet I'm still learning, still seeking a higher plane of knowledge. Part of this reality stems from the sheer magnitude of change that has taken place in photography over the last few decades. Part of it might just be that I'm a slow learner!

[Paul]

Dear Mike
I find your 2500 hours theory fascinating. However I do think it does depend on the type of photography one shoots. Documentary photography like that of Antoine D'Agata, Nan Goldin or Anders Petersen has a lot more to do with "looking within", being absolutely sincere, not being afraid or shy to express your deepest desires and thoughts however awful or embarrassing they maybe. As Petersen says, "It has nothing to do with good photos it's about believable images".

[Marc]

What about poems?
Same time, 30,000 words?
And less for haiku?

[C.R. Marshall]

Thanks Mike! I did hope that you would weigh in. By the way, speaking of putting in time, the Peter Turnley workshop in NYC was worth every penny. Thanks for featuring him on your blog.

CRM

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

2,500 hours. Phew! I thought you’d end up referencing the aforementioned 10,000 hours.
Mind you, maybe that’s the difference between proficient and mastered.
Hope you enjoyed the US holiday.

[c.d.embrey]

Some people didn't get the memo. NBC bans DSLRs from first day of Democratic debate https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/28/noisy-cameras-make-trouble-nbc-debate-hall/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad74ebb51cd1

Except for small market pros, and enthusiasts the DSLR era is over. No matter how much a news shooter loves his DSLR, NBC News has just pried it from his still warm hands.

[c.d.embrey]

In relation to Commercial Photography Tom Zimbero said: We don't want democratized content, we want unique content. https://medium.com/@Zimberoff/disrupting-stock-photography-fffe1c7d5b99

How many hours do you need to spend learning unique? Can unique even be taught?

Tom Zimbero has coined the word pixting, for photos posted on Social Media. "Pixting is to photography as texting is to literature."

[Stan B.]

While shooting is the best way by far to learn, shooting time should also be supplemented with intense exposure to a wide variety of: books (ie- photo essays), actual prints and (unless you're a natural born intuitive genius) some measure of direct hands on instruction from someone who really knows what they're doing. The latter can be crucial towards correcting misconceptions, replacing bad habits with good working procedure and imparting individual insights suited to one's particular needs.

[Paul Van]

Numbers - why is always numbers? --I. Jones

I think the real takeaway from these kinds of answers is to practice, set goals and to improve. And, as you say, mindfulness.

Somewhere in there, I would add: it takes time. Time to shoot, time to review and time to improve. Even though we all want to be good/improve now; it take time to make that happen.

[tex andrews]

Let me add to F.I.L.M. : Large format photography. There's nothing like doing it sheet be sheet. All the calculations must go into the single shot, because bracketing is not only awkward, but expensive. No it's not street photography, but it sure is disciplined. I never got good at it (for the expense reason...), but it taught me soooo much, that I did become a far better roll film photographer. And the lessons continue to pay off now that I am a wholly digital photographer.

[Carl Weese]

I'd add that, as David Vestal taught and I've written here a while back, some of the most important time you can put in is the time spent studying, analyzing, learning from your 'contact sheets.' Or slide collection, or browser of digital files. Time spent learning from your own work counts just as much in a quest for mastery as time spent shooting.—Carl