With the most observations on iNaturalist, I came to wondering, if, in the history of photography, @reiner may have actually taken the most photographs of anyone, ever. Or if that is to crazy a claim, categorise to ‘nature’ or ‘wildlife’ photographs?
If like me he misses a few to focus or exposure, or chases an insect for a while I’d say there’s at least a 3:1 ratio of images taken to observations uploaded - so there’s a million photos.
What other profession / hobby involving photography requires such abundance - sports photographers perhaps? Firing thousands of images each event?
Photojournalists and wedding photographers probably are way up there, maybe also astronomers or other light-oriented scientists. Do you count video frames as photos?
In general I’d assume it’d be someone with a minimally controlled / predictable subject who is interested in very specific visual details and hence spends a lot of time processing successive images to find what they want, with weak priors for where the important information is.
It certainly seems like generalist wildlife documenters would be contenders! But I bet microscopists and astronomers would be way up there too.
I think microscopists and astronomers have the disadvantage of not really being able to take lots of photos in rapid succession. (Though I’m counting photos that will be stacked later as 1 and not as x frames)
Astronomers need long exposure times to capture enough light, they can only shoot at night (which they probably also have to somehow combine with sleep). Microscopists need to set up slides. I always get a disappointingly few photos from my sessions with a microscope.
Of course photographers who shoot bigger, more obscure wildlife will often wait for long periods of time for the animal.
But I bet there’s a few people out there obsessed with taking a picture of every tiniest detail of their life, so the crown probably goes to one of them
This is an amazing question - who’s taken the most photographs in the history of photography? It’s really perfect - impossible to definitively answer, but ripe for a multitude of viable arguments. Seriously, I love it - simple, measurable, and yet not. I don’t have much more to contribute on this one, but I’d like to see full, serious consideration of this question, if not here, then somewhere - it’s got all the makings of a fun discussion/article!
I guess that knowing who has taken the highest ammount of photographs is impossible to assess, given that many photos are discarded because of low quality or they are just never published.
However, another question is who has published more photographs than any other human being. I wonder how very avid inaturalist observers fare in comparison to other people that publish photos too (photographers, influencers, public figures …)
Life-loggers are probably up there. This guy used to take over 1200 photos per day. But it’s a pretty dubious form of distinction. Even he discovered that the volume of photos was too great to deal with, and stopped.
Yes, I started photography in the 1980s but couldn’t really afford the cost of film and development so was pretty frugal with pictures. Digital changed all that starting in about the early 2000s so now it’s easy to shoot 100s of pics a day if so inclined — which I’m not. I’d rather focus on quality rather than quantity.
Professional astronomy isn’t really exactly one individual taking photographs so much as a specific telescope project. The Rubin Observatory will save about 20 TB of visual photographic data per night, almost certainly the most for any single civilian visual imaging instrument.
The Square Kilometer Array will generate about 1 TB per second of radio telescope ‘images’ for 6 hours per night (it won’t save all that, but even the amount it will save is overwhelming). For SKA even if you divide that data rate by the number of staff I suspect it would be way up there in terms of the ‘image-related data per person’ statistic.
My other half has photographed motorbike racing professionally. When I asked him his max number, he nonchalantly about 12000 in a day. And that was quite a few years ago. Taking a number of photos of each person on a number of angles on each lap. Let alone if something exciting happens and you just keep your finger on the button.
I’m just glad Reiner comes up my way and identifies a few of my less common observations.
Another technologically created twist to the question of still image counting is indeed video, and in particular, high resolution video.
Last fall I started to use 4k macro video to capture field specimens that were too fast for decent focus opportunities (at least, with my gear), then going back into an editor and extracting a handful of ‘lucky’ sharp frames from the hundreds of each short vid clip. I’ve even had some luck capturing bug and bird in-flight shots if I set the shutter high enough (kinda limited as I’m using a bridge camera).
It’s using abundance and probability-of-success that I believe really paid off. Of course, the downside is the source clips quickly add up to huge storage problems. And, with my gear at least, there’s no ‘raw’ video capture option, so compression artifacting can be an issue. Plus, most video editors cannot automatically attach video clip metadata (not even a basic date) when extracting single frames.
Still, did I technically take 3,000 shots of a rare bug in that 2 min vid clip? Or 3,000 potentially useable ones?
Likewise with cropping. If you have an ultra high rez camera and shoot say, an ant swarm – couldn’t you claim you have hundreds of potential ant ‘shots’ if you were willing to spend the mind-numbing hours to go and go nuts with cropping?
And that makes me wonder when we’ll start to see AI ‘individual specimen extraction and analysis’ software being incorporated into consumer photo products.
Probably sports-type photographers (as indicated by @donna165). They would be rapid shooting for a few hours one or two days a week. When i had a poorer camera I did shoot using exposure bracketing (3 photos at a time) and often got over 1000 photos on a busy day. Just checked a typical day (22nd) I took 557 photos, kept 440 (good camera, lower wastage) that turned into 283 photo observations. Still, I think I’m probably around the 1M photos in my life, still have most of my backups… 948,756 files 2001 to 08-2024 (lost a few early ones). But I guess that could be doubled for the ones I threw out…
