How many digital pictures is enough? I've been known to take 300 in ONE DAY. With no worries about paying to process film, it's easy to adopt an attitude of "take so many shots that your subject wants to kill you."

In many ways, taking lots of pics is a good strategy. It's certainly improved my photos. I've able to learn a lot through practice. And the more shots you take, the better your odds are of coming up with a real winner. But I've been trying to cut down on my tendency to want to document EVERYTHING, no matter how mundane. As Ivor Tossell asks in an astute piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail, has digital-photo taking become compulsive? He writes:

It is as if people fear that moments won't exist unless they've been reduced to bits. No transgression goes undocumented, no inebriation goes unpublicized and no child goes un-camcorded ... It all gets posted to YouTube and stuck on Flickr, filling up giant, remote server farms like the one Google built on a river in Oregon. It's not just family snaps any more, it's every square inch of populated turf, every spare moment of carousing, the combined detritus of Facebook friendship, artistic impulse and wish-you-were-here idleness. The world is so redundantly well-documented, it's as if you could reconstruct a virtual reality out of it.

Let's see. I've got something like 18,000 photos on my hard drive. (In a completely gratuitous attempt to show him off, here's one below of my 5-year-old nephew Connor getting autographs from cast members Tami Cowger and Max Debbas at the performance of "Annie Get Your Gun" I took him to at Roger Rocka's Dinner Theater.) Do I need to join a support group or something?