A Good Lesson for Photographers: Keep Your Originals

[Jason Dunn]

I learnt a valuable lesson recently and I thought it was worth passing on to anyone that takes pictures, professional or amateur (though likely the pros already have this one down pat). Nearly a year ago, in May 2007, I posted an entry to my blog about the huge dump of snow that fell, and I posted the following picture:

 

It was one of those "open the door to the back yard, take a picture with your point and shoot camera, resize it for the blog, upload it, then delete it because it's only for the blog" types of things. The version of the photo on my blog is the only version that exists. A few months ago, I was contacted by a French book author who specializes in writing about extreme weather conditions. He liked my photo and wanted to publish it in a book, but needed a high-resolution version...which of course I didn't have. So no book for me! The lesson here is that if you're publishing your photos online, be sure to keep the high-resolution copy - you never know when they might come in handy...

[Jason Dunn]

I learnt a valuable lesson recently and I thought it was worth passing on to anyone that takes pictures, professional or amateur (though likely the pros already have this one down pat). Nearly a year ago, in May 2007, I posted an entry to my blog about the huge dump of snow that fell, and I posted the following picture:

 

It was one of those "open the door to the back yard, take a picture with your point and shoot camera, resize it for the blog, upload it, then delete it because it's only for the blog" types of things. The version of the photo on my blog is the only version that exists. A few months ago, I was contacted by a French book author who specializes in writing about extreme weather conditions. He liked my photo and wanted to publish it in a book, but needed a high-resolution version...which of course I didn't have. So no book for me! The lesson here is that if you're publishing your photos online, be sure to keep the high-resolution copy - you never know when they might come in handy...

[Janak Parekh]

Yeah, every picture I take first gets imported into my photo management app (iPhoto) and only then do I manage it from there, keeping the original. I do delete pictures from iPhoto, but those are part of the usual culling (getting rid of crappy, redundant, etc.).

Speaking of which: have you been snapping pics of the winter snap you guys are having this April in Calgary? It's supposed to be around 76F/~25C here tomorrow in NYC...

--janak

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Janak Parekh

Speaking of which: have you been snapping pics of the winter snap you guys are having this April in Calgary?

Nah, it's nothing special for us to get lots of snow in April - if it snows in late May or June, well, that's news.

[sundown]

Good advice. I snap a lot of "just for the blog" pictures and then one day realized it might be kinda nice to convert the blog into a printed book (just for me). Relatively high-res pictures will be required if I decide to do that.