The most prolific photographer ever?

garryknight

garryknight

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Some of you may have heard of Thomas Hawk. He says, "I’m trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 finished, processed photographs before I die." That's one million photos. He already has an amazing number of them on his Flickr feed. Or should I say a number of amazing photos? Because he's not just prolific, he's good. Very good. Just take a look at his Let's Drive Forever Baby.

Obviously, not everything he does is as good as that one, but he's got a great eye for a photograph. Just browse through his many collections of sets to see what I mean.

His personal website is here and he not only posts some of his best photos there, he has an interesting blog that's well worth reading. And if you haven't got time to check out his Flickr stream, just have a look at some of his best stuff on 500px.

I'm not sure if I wish I were Thomas Hawk or not. But I'm certainly going to look to him for inspiration from time to time.
 
So how many has he got and how long did it take?

I have over 100 thousand processed pics for sale on my website ..
 
Pretty impressive.

He's got a bit of a way to catch up with Garry Winogrand, who probably holds the title for the most prolific photographer that many people have heard of. He left 300,000 unedited images and 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film behind when he died in 1984.

Digital makes numbers games like that a lot cheaper though :)
 
KIPAX said:
ta:)

not even half what I have.. and only 2 yrs difference.. pah ..most prolific my backside...
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With respect the nature of his and your photography is quite different. You attend sporting events so capture many photos of the same subject(s) in just a couple of hours, whereas he has much more varied subject matter that is far harder to shoot in volume whilst maintaining quality. In terms of pure prolificness (I didn't expect that to be a word but my spellcheck seems to think it is :D) I'd expect someone doing your type of photography to produce huge volumes of similar work. I don't think you can take away what an achievement it is to produce such a large volume and variety of work, and seem to maintain a great standard too (I haven't seen it all so can't say for sure) :)
 
TriggerHappy said:
With respect the nature of his and your photography is quite different. You attend sporting events so capture many photos of the same subject(s) in just a couple of hours, whereas he has much more varied subject matter that is far harder to shoot in volume whilst maintaining quality. In terms of pure prolificness (I didn't expect that to be a word but my spellcheck seems to think it is :D) I'd expect someone doing your type of photography to produce huge volumes of similar work. I don't think you can take away what an achievement it is to produce such a large volume and variety of work, and seem to maintain a great standard too (I haven't seen it all so can't say for sure) :)
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are you suggesting i dont maintain a standard of photography?

your right.. it must have been hard work... but he still isnt anywhere near as prolific as we where led to believe.. prolific with small print it seems but ceratinly not prolific enough to be crowned the most prolific ever.

i understand and agree with what your sayimg...I dont think i am anywhere near the most prolific and he doesnt come close to my collection.. stating his where harder to get doesnt change the math :)


PS All mine where processed.. nothing straight out the camera and never any batch processing..
 
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KIPAX said:
are you suggesting i dont maintain a standard of photography?

your right.. it must have been hard work... but he still isnt anywhere near as prolific as we where led to believe.. prolific with small print it seems but ceratinly not prolific enough to be crowned the most prolific ever.

i understand and agree with what your sayimg...I dont think i am anywhere near the most prolific and he doesnt come close to my collection.. stating his where harder to get doesnt change the math :)


PS All mine where processed.. nothing straight out the camera and never any batch processing..
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Not at all, and I was consciously careful with my wording to try to not come across that way. Obviously not careful enough. But that wasn't what I meant at all :)

Agreed that when it comes to being the most prolific the only thing to matter is the total and there's probably many have produced more photos than you or him, I just wanted to emphasise the impressive achievement of taking so many photos in such a short time frame of such varied subject matter whilst maintaining a very high quality (again, not disputing the quality of what you do).
 
Nice to see that I've sparked a bit of a debate. I deliberately used the work 'prolific' in the title because that's what I see everywhere I come across any mention of Thomas Hawk, and I've seen "the most prolific" several times. For me, his prolificity (and, yes, that's another word :)) isn't about the total number of photos he creates. It's more about how fast he produces them.

I've been doing photography for about 4 years and have some 4,700 photos on Flickr. (Since I use Flickr as a 3rd offline backup, this represents all of the photos that I think are worth keeping.) So my 'prolificity' in that sense is about 1,175 per year, or 3 and a quarter photos per day. Thomas Hawk's is something like 58,000 in 7 years (at least, on Flickr), or 8,285 per year or 22.7 per day. And he's probably got a lot of photos that aren't on Flickr. The only way I could match him is to put my camera in rapid-fire mode and take 7 of each shot...

There are some days I go out with the camera and can hardly find anything to photograph. But he seems to always find things. His collection on Flickr is one of the most varied and eclectic I've ever seen. So, as I said in my original post, I'm certainly going to look to him for inspiration, "most prolific" or not.
 
Thats all fair enough Garry... But not being a mind reader I based my replies on your announcement to talk photogrpahy that he was the most prolific photographer ever.. when he doesnt even come close .
 
garryknight said:
Thomas Hawk's is something like 58,000 in 7 years (at least, on Flickr), or 8,285 per year or 22.7 per day.
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my 12 year old daughter smashes 22.7 per day out of the water using her phone :lol:
 
want to post a million photos?

If he was doing it for the next 40 years, that would mean 69 photos a day to hit that target.
 
KIPAX said:
Thats all fair enough Garry... But not being a mind reader I based my replies on your announcement to talk photogrpahy that he was the most prolific photographer ever.. when he doesnt even come close .
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Well, that's fair enough, too, but please notice that my title for the thread is "The most prolific photographer ever?" with a question mark at the end. It wasn't intended to be an announcement but to give an opportunity for discussion.
 
He's also made pretty much the entire industry aware of the fact... :)

Douché.
 
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