Sometimes Deleting Can Be Good: The Concept of Culling in Digital Photography
Answer me this my fellow digital photographers: when you come back from shooting a bunch of photos with your camera, do you keep them all? Or do you delete some of them? I'm not talking about the blurry ones, or the ones that are too dark to be rescued. I'm asking if you delete photos that turned out well. Does the thought of that scare you? Do you believe that the real benefit of digital photography is the ability to shoot as many pictures as you want of the same thing, and keep them all? Then this article is for you.
I love digital photography. Prior to going digital, I wasn't very interested in photography. I was enchanted by the idea of photography; capturing memories and images, but I was less enthused about the costs, and the limitations of never knowing if that shot you took actually turned out until after you developed it. I became more interested in photography in college, after having purchased a 35mm Canon Rebel for a photography class, and enjoying the feel of a camera really meant for taking pictures. As I moved to digital after getting a Kodak DC265 in 1999, I realized that the rules had definitely changed. It's taken me a few years to develop a system of working with digital images that works for me, and I hope to share part of that system with you today.
The Importance of Culling I think you should get in the habit of deleting "good" photos, and here's why: I believe that deleting/culling photos is an important part of learning how to be a better photographer. The word fficial"">culling has its genesis in ranching, but the idea is a good one: separating the weak from the strong, for the purpose of making the remainder even stronger. It has powerful implications for digital photography.
If you snap five pictures of a scene, odds are that only one of those images captures the moment better than all the others. Often it's hard to make the judgement if they're really close - I often have to do A/B comparisons of photos several times before I pick the one that has the most impact. Looking at your images and comparing them helps you learn what makes a photo great. Sometimes it's the small details of a photo that make it better, while other times one photo is just technically better than another one - better exposure, a better angle, or better composition. There are exceptions to this rule of course - often times, especially with photos of human/animal subjects shot in rapid succession, you can capture spontaneous moments and the entire series of photos tells the story.
It's my belief that keeping five nearly identical photos foster a pack-rat mentality that holds a photographer back from improving. If you keep all your images, you never have to think about why one is better than the other. That means you never have to look critically at your own photography and learn what types of photos you should be striving for when you bring that camera up to your eye and press the shutter release.
Back in my analog days of photography, I went on a vacation to Arizona. Never having been there, I was enchanted by the vivid colours - the red rocks, the yellow desert, the vivid sunsets. During the week I was there, I shot around 12 rolls of 36 exposure film. Returning home, I got it all developed, and requested doubles for good measure. It was a hefty developing bill! When I started looking through my images, I was stunned to realize that I had taken so many images of the same thing. After ten photos of cacti and twenty photos of red rocks, they all start to look the same. I was disappointed in myself for not only trying for more variety in my photography, but more so for not realizing what a waste of money and film it was to take so many pictures of the same thing. Now that we're in the digital world the waste isn't in money and film, it's in hard drive space, and collections of memories that are bloated by too many photos. Having a collection of 20,000 digital photos isn't a good thing if 15,000 of them are near-duplicates of the other 5,000. The Concept in Practice When I'm out shooting with my DSLR, I'll typically snap a minimum of two or three images of almost everything. I'll vary the angle slightly with each photo, zoom in less/more, maybe fiddle with a setting here and there, but all the photos will be very similar. When I return to my PC to dump the images to the hard drive, that's when the process begins. I view my JPEG images (I haven't made the jump to RAW yet, that's another story) using ACDSEE because it allows me to view in full screen, without any toolbars or distractions, and because it's blisteringly fast at rendering large images.
The first pass I make is to delete the obviously bad photos. These are the photos where, the second you see them, you know they need to be deleted. Photos that are significantly out of focus, too dark to salvage with software exposure adjustments, and images that are just plain badly shot. For the second pass, I'll go through and start looking at the images that are redundant. This is where culling comes into effect. Which is the best photo out of those four I took of the same subject? Which photo best represents the memory of what I saw? I delete any photos that don't represent the best of the set.
My third, and usually final pass, is the comparison of all photos in the set. This means I compare photos of the same type shot at different times. This is also the pass where I'll decide which images need to be adjusted, and which will benefit the most from it. So, on a recent vacation, I shot around 20 photos of the beach at different times, on different days, and from different angles. Do I really need 20 photos of the same beach to remind of me of what it looked like 30 years from now? No, I do not. I set about comparing all the images, and got the number down to around five images that represented different parts of the beach, showing different things (sand, waves, the sun setting, etc.).
Tell Great Stories with Your Photos I believe that photos tell a story, and in the same way that a good story doesn't repeat the same thing over and over, having near-duplicates of the same image is equally useless. I like to cull my images until I feel the story is as tight and powerful as possible. Great stories have impact, and so should your photos.
On a recent trip to Mexico I shot around 1200 images in total, but by the time I had my final cut of images, I was down to 290. That's still a lot of photos for a one-week vacation, but I feel it tells the story of our vacation in a manner that shares the depth of our experience without making for a boring story. Would I show someone 290 photos of my vacation? Not at all. When I've shown photos to our friends and family, I do a "highlights" version and pull 40-60 images. The images that best represent the experiences we had are the ones that get shown. Coming up with a highlights reel is much simpler when you have a strong set of images to start from.
Here's an experiment: go back to some of your earliest digital photos, and browse through them. How is the story that your images tell you? Is there a lot of repetition, or does it flow from one memory to the next? Sometimes culling is made easier years after the fact - I know I've gone back on older photo shoots and hindsight allows for a much clearer vision of which memories are important and which are just taking up space. Give it a try.
Do you cull your images? Or are you a digital pack rat? I'm very interested in hearing opinions from other digital photographers on this subject, so if you have an opinion, share it!
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.
Some of the pictures are completely horrible and should be deleted because they don't add anything to the story to the viewer(they do get better on the later pages of the gallery). But, to my wife and I, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I figured keep everything. When my wife and I look at pictures, even if it is a bad picture, there might be a subtle detail that brings back a laugh or an additional memory that none of the other photos might.
I found this same issue with our wedding photos. A few years after our wedding, I purchased the complete set of negatives from the photographer and had prints made of everything. Even though some of the additional pictures were not very good (which is why he left them out from our original set), there were little details in these that were not in the others which again served to key additional memories of the event.
So, since storage is essentially free, why not keep everything. Sure, if you are putting an album together, hand pick the best. And yes, I do plan on doing just that in my smugmug account, right now I am in the process of loading everything, but I will go back eventually and make the full galleries private and then make a highlights gallery of just the good stuff. Of course then people might think I am a better photographer than I acutally am.
I am definitely a packrat. I agree with Chris, since storage space is so cheap, why not keep them all? So I do.
However, I also have a culling process: It's called printing. When you take 3-4 shots of each picture (pictures of each shot?), you learn real quick that you won't be printing all of them. So I always end up doing the A-B thing with my photos to find the best one of each set. Those are all copied into their own folder, usually titled 'print'. Then I examine each of those photos and do color-correction, image enhancement etc. What I am left with is a group of photos that are all excellent. And I still have the originals in case I need them. I can always archive them on DVD if I need the HD space (not likely when I work with 3GB video files). I may also create a second nested folder titled 'email' where I might downsample the finals into an easily-emailed size.
In short, I say keep as much as possible, but learn to identify your best pics and seggregate them so you can find them again easily in the future.
I am definitely a packrat. I agree with Chris, since storage space is so cheap, why not keep them all? So I do.
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?
But, to my wife and I, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I figured keep everything. When my wife and I look at pictures, even if it is a bad picture, there might be a subtle detail that brings back a laugh or an additional memory that none of the other photos might.
I hear what you're saying, but let me play Devil's Advocate here for a minute (and please don't take offense). Take a look at this picture:
Both are are the same thing: the woman standing in front of the cat. One is in focus, one is blurry. Why keep the blurry one? Don't they evoke the exact same memory and communicate exactly the same idea?
I'm realizing this issue is almost philosophical in nature, because it relates to how people think of memories. Fascinating!
Good example (and that is truly a bad picture); BUT, that was taken from outside of the enclosure (through glass) before we went in. That actually reminded me that the cats were playing together before we went in. Naturally, they put their guard up once we entered.
But, I do see your point to an extent. I have four pictures all similar to that one. I'm betting you would delete all four. They are so similar, I could see just keeping one.
This kind of reminds me of the show "Clean Sweep" on TLC where they get chronic hoarders to clean out their houses.
Both are are the same thing: the woman standing in front of the cat. One is in focus, one is blurry. Why keep the blurry one? Don't they evoke the exact same memory and communicate exactly the same idea?
But the blurry one is better lit. Ideally, I should fix up the clear one the best I can and delete the blurry one.
Really it is a psycological thing. I would imagine the same thing that makes someone a packrat with physical items would impact their digital photos as well. The effect might even be greater because there is essentially no cost to keeping everything versus the risk (however unfounded) of tossing something that you would wish you had kept.
But the blurry one is better lit. Ideally, I should fix up the clear one the best I can and delete the blurry one.
Right! Something this is what you want to keep to remember that memory:
One good photo, not two that are almost the same. The idea of "I'll just keep 'em all" encourages you to not think about which are the best and tweak them to make them even better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Gohlke
I would imagine the same thing that makes someone a packrat with physical items would impact their digital photos as well. The effect might even be greater because there is essentially no cost to keeping everything versus the risk (however unfounded) of tossing something that you would wish you had kept.
Absolutely! I think, though, that there is a cost, it's not not apparent. It's not storage - hard drives are insanely cheap. I think the real cost may be more related to time and future generations. So here's what I mean by that: let's say you add 2000 digital photos to your collection every year, but you don't cull/correct them. You just amass them. 20 years from now, when you look back on those memories, do you want to have to sort through 40,000 images, half of which are meaningless? Or would you rather have a collection of images that are easier to manage, share, view, etc.?
Also, what about sharing them with future generations? It's the difference between my grandmother giving me shoeboxes full of 5000 images, or her giving me photo albums of the 500 important images. I almost feel like I have an obligation to the future to keep my own history somewhat entertaining. ;-)
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. If someone reading this doesn't organize other aspects of their life, the concept of organizing digital photos is probably completely alien to them and this article is likely useless. :lol:
As for a reason why you should keep them, well, no particular reason, but can you give me a reason why I should delete them if I've already sorted through them and seggregated the best ones (and have plenty of storage space)? :wink:
Sometimes the dupes are cool because they remind me of how hard it was to get a certain shot... Sometimes I keep them just because my eye was in the viewfinder for most of the event and it's the only way I'll get to see the subtleties. Sometimes I take a number of shots in a sequence, but when I choose one to print it will only be one out of the set.
For example: I have a great set from Xmas with a coworker opening his gift from me. The various expressions that his face goes through are priceless. If I were to choose one to print though, it would just be the final shot where he's holding up his present with a big smile.
The other shots are kept only so I can re-experience the situation in the future. Are they great shots? No. Am I keeping them to show other people? No. Will I be deleting them? Definitely not.
As far as future generations go, I hate to say it, but I'm really not shooting for them. I'm primarily shooting for me. I don't expect future generations to sort through 50 pictures of my cat, even if I've culled them down from 500. :lol:
Sometimes Deleting Can Be Good: The Concept of Culling in Digital Photography
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