It can also have the opposite affect of making one lazy as the phrases that are now floating around suggest: if you shoot enough of a subject something is bound to be good. That's not a helpful nor productive or constructive approach. The idea is to work on technique so that you can get what you see the first time.
But I was talking about learning, and the way to work on technique is to test enough different possibilities in enough different conditions to find out what looks best. With film, this can be very costly. With digital, mistakes are essentially free. (OK, the camera costs money, but that's sunk cost, not ongoing film and processing cost.)
Digital, in the concept Jeff described above, can be very beneficial as it gives immediate feed back on how you have photographed what you thought you were seeing thereby revealing the proficiency of your technique.
It's not the immediate feedback that I think is good for teaching, it's the ability to try every permutation for oneself to find what one likes. Too many people don't test enough variants and end up doing things "by the book" instead of finding other things they might prefer.
Jeff Spirer
Photos: http://www.spirer.com
One People: http://www.onepeople.com/
Surfaces and Marks: http://www.withoutgrass.com
