What to keep and what to trash?

[arneson]

Being new to photography I'm trying to find order in some things I do, like the post production work flow, and specifically what to keep and what to trash. How do you guys determine this? I obviously trash anything that is just flat out horrible composition or is blurry. But what about underexposed and overexposed shots? I know those can be fixed in PP. There are times when I'll take 30 shots of the same thing and have a good set of exposures. At that point I can't decide to keep the over/underexposed shots around for possible future use or if I'm just cluttering my catalog.

Any insight you guys can provide would be much appreciated. I know a lot of it probably comes down to personal preference or how much you're willing to spend on hard drive space.

 

[OffTheWall]

i usually keep all my images my aperture library is a little over 200GB large lol the ones that come a bit blurry, a bit blown out, i usually edit them as snapshots and throw them on facebook or myspace lol.

 

[subscuck]

But what about underexposed and overexposed shots? I know those can be fixed in PP.

Sometimes. Too far in either direction and they can't be pulled back. Eventually you learn from the histogram, or by eye, whether or not it can be saved in PPing. Any pic that can't be saved due to exposure, OOF, bad composition, etc., just takes up space on my hard drive and gets deleted. The most important thing to remember is not to get sentimental about pics. If they're bad pics, no matter how you feel about them, nobody wants to see them. Delete 'em.

 

[Steve01]

I'll throw out the mistakes like super over or under exposed or very blurry shots but I keep everything else.

With that said if I took 30 shots of something I'd probably throw out some of those since you have that subject covered pretty well.

 

[DanFinePhotography]

i keep pretty much everything. Hard drive space is cheap and abundant :thumbup:

 

[eilla05]

Having this same issue! I want to keep everything and have just decided to make Cd's with everything on them so that I will have them but they are nto taking up space on my computer

 

[LarryD]

I think that you need to evaluate what you intend to use your photos for..

Commercial stuff is, of course, part of a professional portfolio and should be filed like any commodity...

But...........If it's for self-satisfaction mostly, anything goes....however, ..at some point you're storing borderline photography of scenes or subjects that will never see light again..............

............ at that point, it's time to toss out those that aren't up-to-par.........

I like to go back to those areas where I think that I can improve on what I have in the can, take some new shots, then toss the old ones that have outlived their usefulness...

 

[mrsmacdeezy]

Man, I desperately need to clean out my hard drive... I'm such a packrat!! Most of the time I keep the ones I am unsure about to decide late on, but then later on doesn't come

 

[Overread]

My first advice is to never delete in the camera nor just after a photo shoot. Deleting in the camera body should be reserved for "Oh I left the lenscap on" type shots only and really its better to just buy another memory card and stick it in than it is to spend ages with your eyes on the LCD sorting through shots. Furthermore the LCD has a special power of making good shots look bad and bad shots look good on it - I use my LCD for histogram review most of the time whilst also checking focus and composition.

Further right after shooting we are often at our most critical - when "Oh I should have done..." is right in our mind for every shot and its very easy at this stage to be very harsh and dump a lot of photos that are either perfectly fine or could be made acceptable within the users medium (eg print or internet sizes etc..) with a little bit of editing.


Furthermore as others have said memory is now very affordable for most so holding onto photos is often a better approach to dumping them. I will say that the best thing you can do is have an organised archive of your photos - keep them organised and it makes both finding and sorting a heck of a lot easier. IF they are higgledy piggledy all over the place you'll find it a nightmare to find anything.

 

[Steve01]

Having this same issue! I want to keep everything and have just decided to make Cd's with everything on them so that I will have them but they are nto taking up space on my computer

Use archival quality CD's or DVD's and don't count on the disks as you only backup.

 

[arneson]

.....I like to go back to those areas where I think that I can improve on what I have in the can, take some new shots, then toss the old ones that have outlived their usefulness...

That's actually a great point, I did that the other night and was very happy with the results. Another good piece of advice I got here was to become very familiar with a location. I think that helps weed out the older lower quality photos.

Thanks!

 

[ToadMum]

Man, I desperately need to clean out my hard drive... I'm such a packrat!! Most of the time I keep the ones I am unsure about to decide late on, but then later on doesn't come

I do the same thing. I really need to clean up my hard drive, but I just can't seem to find the time to do it.

 

[mwcfarms]

Man, I desperately need to clean out my hard drive... I'm such a packrat!! Most of the time I keep the ones I am unsure about to decide late on, but then later on doesn't come

I do the same thing. I really need to clean up my hard drive, but I just can't seem to find the time to do it.

In two weeks I have added 20GB of pictures. Time to weed. I will run out of room at this rate.

 

[supraman215]

1TB drives are cheap, your time to go through thousands of pictures is not. Take the time when you first get the pics on the computer to weed out the good from the bad. Maybe you have 3 categories in your head, delete, keepers, and BEST, maybe put BEST in a separate folder, and leave keepers where they are.