Timings / 10,000 hours

Timing / Sorting / 10000 hours / Work Rate 

First of all, can I apologise for the delay and gap in blogs - life got a little in the way, but think I’m back on tract now, (famous last words but let's go for the positive.) 

I’m also taking this opportunity to take a bit of a departure from the program this blog because it’s been a strange few weeks; still in pandemic lockdown three and it seems like this one has really knocked me off kilter. I did previously state that luckily, I was doing quite well but that was until February where life has hit hard and I’ve needed to step sideways and sort some things out.. 

Although, luckily again I’ve still been able to create some work and ideas but it’s the writing that has suffered so much. I think it is the piece I’m working on rather than anything else but I’m trying to right (write) that here..  

I think this latest round of (avoidable) lockdown has all hit a bit differently for everyone; for me it’s really affected the “getting things on paper” side. I know that this isn’t a major problem in the grand scheme of things but as it’s a part of where I’m trying to get to with my practice then it’s a large-ish factor. 

This blog has a number of titles but the overarching theme seems to be timing, making, sorting and reflection on. At the base level, photography is all about timing, when, how and if you take an image. There’s also the background to that, from charging your batteries to making sure the theory you’ve just read is sound and able to translate well.  

One fact that I always seem to recall when things are like this is the 10,000 hours theory. When I mention it, some people seem doubtful, so I’m never sure how familiar people are with this theory. It really seems to stick in my mind and it was the buzz phrase a number of years ago and is outlined very well here by Hallie O’Neill.  

“The concept of 10,000 hours is just one of the ideas  

introduced in this novel. Gladwell proposes that once a person  

has practiced his or her craft for 10,000 hours, they enter a  

threshold of genius through which fame and fortune become  

tangible possibilities. At that point, the person is talented  

enough or smart enough or capable enough to be truly  

successful. From there, it’s usually just a matter of happenstance.” 

As a little background to the 10,000 hours theory, it seems to have come to prominence in “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell but was also proposed by a number of authors at that time too, and stems from research done by K Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, where he produced a paper called “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”.* 

The 10k hour theory, that if you do something for that amount of time then you could possibly be classed as an expert at it, was seized upon by many at that time, it always felt like that was maybe a short hand way of judging it, it didn’t take account talent, skill or luck just sheer force of putting the hours in.  

And to apply the maths, 10k hours equates to 1250 of working days presuming a working day is 8 hours a day. If you convert that into years then that would equate to just around 5 years depending if you want to work 50 weeks a year or 45 weeks. Working that out shows why you need that vital Maths qualification.. 

So as ever I have questions, so many specific questions that I feel I never answered at that time, such as time explored and yes I realise that I may need to add this book and the theories around it to the reread pile but for the purposes of the blog then I’ll plough on.  

So main questions as ever concern photographic ideas, so I’ll see if I can break it down.. 

Firstly what counts as an hour in this theory?  

I mean when I think about how I’ve made images over the last 40 years I think about a whole load of different things…where to get them, how to create them, what viewpoint to take, how I would possibly react to an event happening or reading a situation or even reading of a book…then when I think of Urgent Temporality there are all the books that I’ve studied, research etc. It all comes into play… 

So exactly which bits do I count? Or which moments don’t I count?  Do those blinding vivid dreams that inspired images for instance, surely they don’t count do they? I wasn’t even conscious… 

If I think about it another way and put it into a practical sense, and only count the moment when we make the image, working out an average exposure time of my images comes to around a 1/60 of a second. Upscaling that it’s roughly 60 images a second, lets times that by 60 to get 3,600 images per minute then again times by 60 to get 216,000 images per hour then times that by 10,000 to get the grand total of 2,160,000,000 

That’s 2 billion and one hundred and sixty million.  

Convert that again and that’s 60 million rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film (or a 180 million medium format rolls using 12 exposures) or 90 million GB worth (that’s 140,6250 64 GB cards) of raw files.  

That’s the numbers in black and white.  If we apply the maths, then if you’ve taken that number of images then you’re an expert. 

Taking all that into account I must be at least getting close to one of those figures, so where’s my fame, fortune and success????? 

Ah well as Gladwell (via O’Neill) says.......  

“…it’s usually a matter of happenstance..“ 

As usual we need an image for a post and heres one for this, it’s a starting point for a possible project I’m contemplating that touches on revisiting and timings so I see a line of enquiry opening up here or maybe it’s just a happenstance?

Thank you for reading