Who said the "Your first 10,000 pictures..." quote or said it first?

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

...or maybe the first 10,000 to make it off the media from your camera. I can see someone shooting 100,000 images, chimping & deleting 95,000 of them and only saving 5,000 of them on other media.

-KwM-

You could probably say the same about analog photo: until you've printed your 10k in your darkroom, you don't know about photo.

[Michael W]

I heard it as a Cartier-Bresson quote, but who knows.

[Maris]

I actually did it.

After taking money out of my first ever pay-cheque to buy the first camera, a Practika fx3, I figured that the best way to really learn photography was to make lots of exposures and take note of the successes and failures. The local camera store ran a B&W darkroom and they developed my film, usually HP-4, and made a contact sheet all for A$1.50.

I was on my way and about 300 rolls of 36 exp later I felt ready to tackle Kodachrome and a home darkroom.

Looking at those old negatives and contact sheets convinces me I went about things the wrong way. I should have done a proper photography course with a good teacher. Ten thousand photographs, many featuring the cat and the dog, are a sign of inefficiency not diligence.