Thomas Hawk wrote an interesting piece the other day about his goal to publish 500,000 photos in his lifetime. At his current rate of taking 200 photos per day and publish 20 of them, he approximates this to take him another 66 years to achieve the magical 500k goal.

I read this and was utterly shocked at this goal. 500,000 photos at first seemed like a tenable achievement, but thinking about that and doing the math, this is almost absurd to me. It’s not that I couldn’t take more than 20 photos per day, every day. It’s that I find it hard to believe anyone could take that many quality photographs at that rate. Thomas presumes that his rate of photos per day will increase as he gets older because (a) he’ll retire one day which will allow him to take more photos and (b) technology will get better allowing him to be more productive.

After thinking about it more, I’m not sure I’d even want to set this goal. It seems artificial and the value would be begging to be watered down just to meet the sheer quantity of photos required.

What do you think?