Digital shooters..what do you keep?

Morelos · Dec 9, 2004

I throw almost everything away... haha, of course I keep the "good" ones but eventually I think the good photos are crap so... they all end in the recycle bin...

ksmattfish · Dec 9, 2004

I'm a film geek, but the siren song of the DSLR is ringing in my ears, I'm sure I'll have one soon. I plan on trying to keep as many of my digital images as possible, even the bad shots. Before I got into photography I was writing and doing other visual arts. Common advice from some of my instructors was never throw anything out, until you've put it away for a while, forgotten about it, and rediscovered it. I've followed this advice with my photography also. If it still sucks after at least a year, it's probably okay to toss it, but maybe you'll have a different opinion the second time around.

I also find some days photos look better than other days. I stumbled upon this one last night. When taken, I did not like it, and last night it appealed to me.

Since I got my neg scanner I'm going back through a lot of my older images. Some of them I didn't look at twice 8 years ago, but now they are grabbing my eye. It's like finding treasure!

I think professionals wouldn't want people to see their bad work.

I don't go around posting or hanging my mistakes, but I hang onto them, and look at them myself. Studying them I can learn not to make those mistakes. It's also a documentary of how my photography is evolving. There is no "best" without "worst".

Ant · Dec 10, 2004

That's a lot of my thinking ksmattfish. I'm still not as good at post editing as I'd like to be and I keep thinking that maybe in a years time when I've improved I might actually be able to do something with the not-so-good shots.....then again the terms silk purse and sow's ear sometimes come to mind

I agree on the learning from your mistakes bit too. I look at the bad ones and the exif info can tell me the shooting parameters, then I know if I screwed up the shutter speed, focus or whatever.

I think coming back to them after a year is a great idea. If they still look irrecoverably bad and I've learnt my mistakes from them then I'll start editing with the delete key.

ksmattfish · Dec 10, 2004

An intersting aspect of this in the professional world is how digital photography is affecting photojournalism and our recording of history. Photojournalists and editors are deleting images that don't seem to have any value, but they may have value in the future.

A famous example is the photo of Monica Lewinsky hugging Pres. Clinton taken long before the scandal. The photographer who took it says that he was surrounded by other photogs taking the same pics, but because they were all using digital, and he was using film, 2 years later he was the only person who had kept the image. All the digital shooters saw no importance in Monica L. so they deleted the image.

Lepospondyl · Dec 10, 2004

I keep everything on my spare 120GB hdd. I'm up to about 6GB now. They're all sorted in general categories and then into more specifics from there. Then, I sort out which ones I REALLY like, and make a copy of them on my laptop.

Agree with the going back through sometimes post. I went through my photos last week, and found some decent pictures of my bamboo shrimp that I probably didn't like when I took them.