Famous war photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Which seems like great composition advice except for the fact that he died after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam while lining up a shot.

Perhaps better advice: "A good photograph is knowing where to stand." - Ansel Adams, instructing photographers to stand in places not currently occupied by landmines, probably. Now Ansel was what most in the business would refer to as a good photographer. But you might also call him call an inductive photographer, though you probably won’t. “Inductive” because he gives very good advice on composing good shots and how to meter by telling you what to do (e.g. know where to stand, know where to meter) and not eliminating all the things that you shouldn’t (e.g. don’t stand on landmines, don’t shoot with the lens cap on). Accordingly, Ansel shot inductively— he took only the good shots and avoided all the bad ones.

But I think it’s wise to use advice from a variety of sources, such as, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” -Wayne Gretzky

I find it really quite impressive that Mr. Gretzky was able to give such sage advice on photography since his own career as a photographer was, by all measures, an abject failure. Look all you want, but you’re not going to find any photographs taken by Gretzky which has received any sort of acclaim. But it is good advice, and advice I’ve followed over the last decade of my own photographic journey as I’ve taken tens of thousands of photos along the way. Which brings us to the other kind of photographer, the deductive photographer.

Through this method, I think that I’ve probably furthered the field by quite a lot as I’ve already taken quite a number of the bad shots that other photographers won’t have to bother with going forward. And, thanks to deductive reasoning, now that all the bad shots are out of the way, what’s left here are the good ones, which is what I’ll leave on this site as they come up.