Robert Frank Mathematical Rendering

Of the one hour of photos that Robert Frank made for his landmark The Americans publication, just over 10 seconds were actually published.

It's a bit of a stretch but if you equate every shot to being roughly 1/125th of a second then the 28,000 shots that were made add up to 1 hour of 'real' time. The 80 odd that were eventually published to 10seconds.

Similarly, W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh project, with 17,000 shots, equates to 35 minutes.

Someone drew this analogy once in relation to how many 'great' images we might make or that might be 'in' us. The very optimistic 500 (or roughly a minutes worth) made me feel rather small...

So... very long exposures are the go!