Do you keep your rejects?

William Petruzzo · Nov 11, 2009

For weddings I usually end up showing the client around 40% of the photos taken. For portrait sessions it's lower. Like Maybe 20%. As of right now, I'm holding onto every shot taken. But for the sake of hard drive space, I'm considering permanently deleting the ones I don't show them.

What's your practice?

IgsEMT · Nov 11, 2009

40% for weddings? Does that mean you throw out 60%?

Once the wedding is banged out, garbage (closed eyes, look-aways, etc) goes to garbage. Everything else, goes to lab for 4x6 proofs. On average it is about 600frames (give/take). Once client chooses what they want for albums, digital images are used to put the album together -> client approves --> sent to print. They keep the proofs.
If, its a DVD-only job, no prints, same idea, only then I, or whoever hired me, will make few collages and will include those on the DVD.
Point is - garbage is garbage.

skieur · Nov 11, 2009

I don't do weddings but yes I keep my rejects if they are good technically or perhaps have space where print could be used within the photo.

skieur

ecnal · Nov 11, 2009

I don't have much experience with paid jobs, but given the going rate for storage space per mb, and depending on how much you charge for your work, you could easily buy an internal SATA drive in the 100+ gig range for pretty cheap. Buy a docking bay for the drives, a SATA to USB one, and keep them in anti-static storage bags, which you get for free with each drive. I have about three SATA drives I use like this. If I want to go back to one for whatever reason, take it out and slap it in the dock.

Big Mike · Nov 11, 2009

I delete the obvious duds right away. I do keep the marginal ones that don't get seen by the client...but every so often, when I'm sure I won't need them, I go through my archive and 'thin the herd' to make storage & backup easier.

LarissaPhotography · Nov 11, 2009

We keep ours around in case the client would ask specifically for an image. It's only come up a handful of times, but I'm glad we saved them for those cases.

beni_hung · Nov 11, 2009

I delete my rejects right after I look at them. If they didn't make the cut then, they'll never make the cut. So why keep them? I do keep all my keepers, though. I'll get rid of them eventually, but I always have that "what if" mentality.

camz · Nov 11, 2009

We only keep the ones that the client knows which are the keepers..everything else is just a waste of space. What they don't know about won't hurt them if getting rid of it and it saves a ton of disk space.

We offer a reminder every year after the event by placing online albums for potential print orders and these we keep forever. On these online albums, we ad the marginal ones that were not chosen initially and he sure helps print sales sometimes.

Overread · Nov 12, 2009

LarissaPhotography said:
We keep ours around in case the client would ask specifically for an image. It's only come up a handful of times, but I'm glad we saved them for those cases.

I've read similar situations where clients have contacted the photographer to ask if they have any shots of a certain person - the example I recall is a sudden death in the family and the only half decent shots they got were from the wedding.
I would say that unless the shot is of the back of your lenscap (ie totally unusable) I would keep every shot from the event on backup. Storage space is dirt cheap these days and I would expect a working professional would make enough income to afford a decent backup setup.

Myself I would say that the lesser shots from the day would simply get the single backing up though (or backing up once in a RAID setup or similar) whilst the keepers and edited keepers would get offsite backup as well since they are the more valuble shots and the ones more likley to be requested at a later date

Flash Harry · Nov 12, 2009

I keep every raw file, once processed, images which are below par get binned and are never seen by the client however if there's a decent crop to be had from one of these then its that one the client gets as the numbered pic in the proofs.

A 40% keep rate would have me looking for another vocation, I shoot, as with film, an average of 300 shots at a wedding binning maybe 30. H

itznfb · Nov 12, 2009

For hobby shots rejects get deleted upon review. Usually on camera. I do a review in ViewNX after import to pc then do another round of deletes. The great captures are saved in RAW, PSD and JPG. The OK shots get saved as JPG.

For jobs all shots are kept. Non-"keepers" are converted from RAW to JPG at about 80% and archived.

I did just setup an amanda server though to handle my backups automatically with several terabytes worth of storage so I don't really need to think about it anymore.

Rifleman1776 · Nov 12, 2009

Keep only the keepers.
Your pictures represent you and your work.
Why keep something that is less than what you would want others to judge you by?
The 'delete' button is your best friend.

Overread · Nov 12, 2009

Heh I never use the delete button in the field - at least on a canon camera the delete shot and delete all are right next to each other - and I don't want to accidentailly hit the delete all on a cold wet day when my fingers are shaking a little. Further if your taking time to review histograms that is time not shooting -taking time to delete takes even longer (unless its a total muffup) so its again more time spent chimping and not shooting.

As for presentation - well I do agree you want your best work out there, but as the example I cited - your best might not show what the client wants and sometimes you will get that little bit of extra work (and thanks) if you do have that half bad shot of Old Uncle Tim before he died - a shot which is way better than his face book pic taken with a webcam.

flightless_beaker · Nov 12, 2009

bpetruzzo said:
For weddings I usually end up showing the client around 40% of the photos taken. For portrait sessions it's lower. Like Maybe 20%. As of right now, I'm holding onto every shot taken. But for the sake of hard drive space, I'm considering permanently deleting the ones I don't show them.

What's your practice?

I know what you are saying. I keep 100% of the photos I take. I've found myself on a few occassions working on "rejects". But like you, I'm considering deleting a bunch from different exposures and stuff since 18mp raw files are huge as hell. I have a 200 gig hard drive and its already half full.