Quantity or Quality: What’s More Important When Hiring a Photographer?

I currently have 11,605 photos on my phone, with the oldest one from Dec 2021. I have never gone back to look at all these photos, but occasionally some snippets here and there. I have literally thousands of photos of my toddler that I don’t even remember exist, to be quite honest. As a parent, it’s hard not to document every little detail of their lives. You want to remember and share every moment of their fleeting childhood – I get it and I’m right there with you. 

Yet I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of slow-living. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the word more than the concept that I love, it sounds like this perfect image of savoring every last drop of that homemade soup, or the endless summer nights that feel like eternity and nostalgia all wrapped up into one. If you’re wondering, by definition, I’m terrible at this way of life as much as I want to deny it. But I bring this up because in my research of how to articulate the concept I’m trying to prove, I learned that humans remember less detail the more they take photos in the moment. It’s essentially telling your brain that you don’t have to remember because your phone will. And the more I thought about this, the more it really sank in for me. It brought me back to this idea of slow-living and being in the moment and fully in connection with both ourselves and those around us. 

As a photographer and artist, my job is not to overwhelm you with hundreds of photos that you ultimately can’t make any choices over because you’re sorting through the same images with little to no variation, removing the meaning and emotional impact of what it could’ve been. My job is to tell a visual story of this moment in time thoughtfully curated for your viewing. It saddens me how much photographers have used the number of images they deliver as a selling point because more photos does not mean higher value. These high volumes of nearly identical images will ultimately get buried in the archives of your device, only to be forgotten. 

So I ask you, are you looking for quantity or quality?