Still, wouldn't you want to crop the photo and save it as "branches" or something? If there's a good element in the photo that you want to keep, don't you want to "extract" it somehow?
Ideally, sure. However, I don't usually have time to do that to the photos I don't care so much about. I have a hard enough time finding time to edit the photos I do care about...
Jason, I think you also touched on another aspect of this issue when you talked about your new Mexico trip....
When I first got a digital camera, I was constantly filling that unit up, and would have exactly what you said, between 4 and 10 shots of the same item, when only one or two were necessary. Over time, I've gotten back to what I would consider some basics; composition, lighting and exposure settings.
Rather than just blasting away with the digital camera, assuming that "one of them will turn out okay", I've tried to get back to the careful, methodical approach that I used to take back when I was shooting 35mm, and had to actually pay for what I shot. Taking a quick moment to assess the scene, and to set the camera appropriately resulted in a few good shots, instead of lots of "okay" shots.
Now, I'm trying to use the shot capacity of my camera and hard drive by getting back to experimenting again - and I got some great images from last summer's vacation as a result.
I don't cull nearly as much as I probably should, but then I'm not shooting like a wild person anymore either........
I'm realizing also that a huge part of this issue is the psychology of organization that a person has. Myself, I'm fairly "Type A" and like to have things organized. I like having my DVDs alphabetized, my MP3s tagged with proper metadata, and my digital photos organized.
Couldn't have said it better. I cull my images, for exactly the same reasons mentioned. When out and about, I'll have no hesitation in taking five shots of the same scene, but the follow-up culling process is very important. Sitting down and flipping through my pictures helps me ask myself a series of questions. How can I change the angle of this shot? How can I use lighting to my advantage? How can I make this shot better? The process of sorting my pictures and deleting the "trash" is an engaging experience.
The "storage is cheap" saying is a valid excuse, but sooner or later, the costs will add up.
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Except for very rare occasions, I delete blurred, overexposed, and underexposed shots. I also generally delete near duplicates unless something in the various pictures causes me to want to keep multiples. But I do that mostly for want of keeping the "best" ones. I have PLENTY of storage on my photo computer (900gb) so that's not an issue at all. I also carry 7gb of storage in the EOS-1D MkII and 4gb in the PowerShot Pro 1 which allows me to take as many shots as I want when I'm on-site and cull later at home. As I tend to do very little post processing, this scheme works well for me.
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Primary: Canon EOS-5D Mark II; Secondary: Canon EOS-1D Mark III; Back Ups: Canon PowerShot G7 and Canon EOS-1N
Related to this whole idea of deleting duplicate images, one of my readers pointed out an awesome app for exactly that purpose. Unique Filer not only finds exact duplicates, it does a slick job of locating files that are compositionally identical, even after color correction, resizing, resampling and other effects have been applied. Not sure if that stays true to the idea of examining each photo and evolving as a photographer, but if you have a ton of dupes, getting a head start through software automation can't hurt.
This is so me. I keep everything. Well, almost. I got over the bad habit of keeping even the blurry or dark ones, but I do hord all the others. All of them. And I keep buying computers with bigger hard drives.
But thank you for opening my eyes. Thank you for making me realize that deleting pictures does not (only) mean saving space. Deleting pictures will INDEED make me a better photographer. Maybe I will some day be able to take one of those shots that I love so much on purpose and not just because they happen "by accident".
This very evening I will start and clean up my hard drive. I will delete all of those pictures of my son that are so similar to each other that you could line them up and make a motion picture of them.
(Well, maybe after I'll archive them on a DVD first...)
I will delete all of those pictures of my son that are so similar to each other that you could line them up and make a motion picture of them.
Hahaha...indeed, if you can make a flip-book from your photos, that's a good indicator that they may need some culling. ;-)
A good benchmark is, when looking at several images that are the same, asking yourself if the images evoke different emotions, or the same. Sometimes similar photos will have subtle differences - a different smile, a smirk, a coyish look in the eyes - but quite often it will be the same memory evoked with each of a series of images. That's when it's time to cull!
Rather than just blasting away with the digital camera, assuming that "one of them will turn out okay", I've tried to get back to the careful, methodical approach that I used to take back when I was shooting 35mm, and had to actually pay for what I shot. Taking a quick moment to assess the scene, and to set the camera appropriately resulted in a few good shots, instead of lots of "okay" shots.
Totally agree with that. I hardly have any duplicate shots. Shots that are a total mess (blurry or someone suddenly half in front of the subject) get deleted but shots that have slight lighting problems stay. It is unbelievable how many so-so shots you can turn into great shots after yet another few more months of Photoshop experience. Sometimes even just by converting them to B/W.
If you keep all your images, you never have to think about why one is better than the other.
If you are using your organizing software's "star system" or "mark up mechanism", you ARE critically appraising your work, which would accomplish the goal he's talking about above.
Additionally, Adobe organizer has "stacks" that are kindof designed to deal with the "multiple shot" phenomenon. Now only if it could figure out how to stack by itself, so I could waste less time doing it.
Now, personally, I find that hard drive space does go fast with a 4MB a shot, 3fps camera, but a an even better argument than space/money is attention. Having an archive full of "blah" shots that you have to sift through looking for the gold, the REAL "keepers", starts to turn the equation around as to whether you have a photo colection, or your photo colection has a maintainer. I haven't come up with a real solution to this myself yet, but services like riya give me hope.
Before I go, here are some reasons why I keep far more images than I probably should:
1. MANUFACTURING gold:
Using photoshop, I can grab the best faces from a large set of the same scene. This also applies for subject blocking and similar issues.
2. RECOVERING history:
That one special moment is the only one like it in all of history, future or past, that sweet baby girl will never smile exactly like that again, so even if the picture is blurry, I will sometimes save it with the hopes of recovering the focus with deconvolution or some other advanced (maybe not yet invented) technology.
truly, no picture I take is worthy of showing to others... they ALL need improvement of some kind; Auto leveling, noise reduction, cropping, "collage" work, ... I have a major segregation on my hard drive to deal with this: a directory hierarchy called "digicam", which contains my "negatives" (ordered/directoried by date) and a hierarchy called "collection" which contains improved works, semi-date, semi-subject organized.
Which sends me Completely Off Topic... Adobe Organizer has one of the COOLEST organization systems ANYWHERE. it's tagged, hierarchical, AND faceted. (three completely different organization systems that complement each other nicely, since they all have major weaknesses) However, it also has three bugs that just drive me bonkers:
Can only export static pages for web use based on a query you pre-define.
Based on a proprietary database technology.
Not extensible. it'd be great to be able to have plugins, or make my own algorithm to do that "stack" bit I was talking about above, or to have someone someday make a "riya-like" plugin. Still, the other two bugs above are bigger, and cool my interest in the fix of this one.
Still, they actually shipped theirs, while my lies in tinkerville on my PC.
But my point was the just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD. ;-) My question for you would be can you give me a good reason for keeping every photo?
And just because one has a Delete key doesn't mean one SHOULD use it.
The problem I have with your premise of deleting 'good' shots is that you're making a permanent decision based on what you think about/how you perceive your shots today. I would NEVER delete 'good' shots. There have been entirely too many occasions where I've sifted through the archives 6 months / a year later and wondered why I originally selected one shot over another to include for 'public' viewing (whatever shape that may take).
The overall idea of 'culling' is certainly a good one and can definitely be a helpful learning tool. But occasionally sifting through available, non-deleted images can be every bit as educational.
Cull, yes........delete, no. "Memory is cheap.....memories are forever."
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