We're all taking too many photographs

The world is awash with photographs - and most of them are crap. We're all taking far too many and they're becoming dangerously devalued. I came to this conclusion when looking at some old family photographs the other day. These are by no means great works of art but they were obviously viewed as important enough to be handed down through the generations. Sixty years ago, having your photograph taken wasn't something that happened every day of the week so people held on to these snaps. That's just not going to happen with most of the stuff we're taking today.

If you frequent Flickr you'll see what I mean. It's become the repository for just about everything that's sitting on the world's hard drives. People routinely upload pics to Flickr that are completely devoid of merit. Why do they do it? I think it's because we're taking so many that we just don't know what to do with them. From my experience, hardly anyone bothers to print their files any more. They seem content to download images onto their computer and then upload them to every Flickr-type site they know of. That's digital's fault of course. If we're shooting film, every negative and every print has a cost. With digital, once we've "invested" in the gear, the photography is free.

I used to think that was a good thing but I've changed my mind. We no longer concentrate on special moments, unusual or memorable events or even great light when it comes to recording the world around us: we now just point a camera at whatever is occurring in front of us. There are lots and lots of cameras out there but very few photographers. Photography has become indiscriminate.

This is my first post in more than a month and that's because I've become jaded. I'd fallen into the trap of shooting too much, too often as well. If I had a camera with me, which I usually do, then the feeling was that I should be taking pictures of something. I started to notice that while many of these pics were well-exposed, sharp and nicely composed, they were still pretty vacuous. To be honest, if I had them stored on just the one hard drive and it exploded, it wouldn't put me up nor down. Photography shouldn't be like that. The photographs we take should matter or what is the point in taking them?

There's a defence to be made in favour of taking a lot of pics when you're learning about photography and digital can be a great teacher in that respect. But once you've learned the basics it's thinking and feeling that count, not shooting. Despite the gigabytes of images we're all taking, how many of us are getting closer to producing the photographic yardstick known as a "body of work"?

Imagine if we were allowed to keep just one photograph a week and had to make a 12x8 print from it - everything else taken over the course of that week had to be deleted. At the end of the year, we'd have 52 special prints. How many of us can hold up our hands and say we have that many prints in frames or in portfolio boxes? I know I can't. I'm nowhere near it. Yes, I've got thousands of files stored on hard drives and some of them are pretty good - but so what? I want to get back to the position where a photograph is only a photograph if it exists as a print. So how do I get there? Well, two things have to happen. One is that I've got to start using more film to get away from this tendency to overshoot and also become more discriminating. The other is that the print has to be the final product. Not images stored on a computer or files uploaded to Flickr. Just the print.

I have to say that I've never really hit it off with inkjet printers. I've got an HP B9180 which was reckoned to be a very good A3+ printer when I bought it a few years ago. I have had one or two prints from it that I've been completely happy with but far more than that just don't do it for me. It may be because I spent a lot of time in the darkroom and I'm comparing inkjet output with glossy, fibre-based silver prints. But I think it's really more to do with the general appearance of inkjet prints. I find it difficult to completely eliminate unwanted colour casts and I seem to be very sensitive to them. Perhaps overly so. The prints' tendency to change colour slightly when moving from one light source to another is also annoying. And yes, gazing at fibre-based silver prints had spoiled me as far as the paper surface goes. I know there are inkjet papers that claim to mimic the fibre-based look but I still prefer the real thing.

So that leaves the darkroom. Back in April I posted about plans I had to put up a special shed in the garden and equip it as a darkroom. Like a lot of things in my life, it's seriously behind schedule but it's still alive. I've got my Leitz V35 enlarger for it and recently picked up a Durst Laborator 1200 which is some machine and goes up to 5x4. In future, I'm going to be a hybrid photographer but I'm coming at it from the opposite direction. Instead of using film, scanning it and printing it out on an inkjet printer, I'll be using film and digital to capture the images, working them up in Photoshop, outputting them to film by means of a high resolution film recorder and printing the resultant negatives in the darkroom. This film recording process is something else that has fallen way behind schedule for reasons outwith my control but it has a lot of merit. Using Photoshop for the "dodging and burning" means that the negatives that come from the film recorder should print more or less straight in the darkroom.

The film recorder is no more than a very high resolution and extremely flat CRT tube in a light-tight box with a revolving turret of very high quality enlarging lenses - for formats ranging from 35mm up to 10x8 - sitting above it. A computer sends the digital file to the CRT and the enlarging lens captures it on film. The prospect of burning images onto 10x8 film and doing contact prints is very alluring. I've spoken to people who have used film recorders and they say the quality of the negative the better ones produce is on a par with an original negative of the same scene.

Back in the 1990s when this technology reached its peak, the film recorder I'll be using cost more than £35,000. It's very high tech, very precise and very German. Of course, I'll still be shooting film and printing directly from it and might even try to pick up a cheap 5x4 camera for fun. Hybrid photography is definitely the way ahead. Fewer photographs, better photographs, more film, higher quality and lots of prints. That's the future for me.