Sometimes Deleting Can Be Good: The Concept of Culling in Digital Photography

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,9740' target='_blank'>http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com...ion=expand,9740</a><br /><br /></div><i>"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><br /><br />This is a bit off-topic, but since many Windows Mobile devices now come with a camera, and a huge percentage of people who own Pocket PCs and Smartphones also own digital cameras, this topic is applicable to almost everyone. Give the article a read and share your comments, I'm genuinely interested in hearing them!

[stevelam]

Me I delete about 1 in 3 and if I have a series of similar shots I will only keep 1 or 2. Call me a scrouge but then I survived on a 30gig HDD till last year.

[andyb]

Culling is good; deleting is bad.

I don't always even delete the blurry ones. Any decent photo organiser will allow you to recognise and mark up your good ones, without you having to throw away the rest "just in case..."

[Jason Dunn]

Culling is good; deleting is bad.

Culling IS deleting. ;-)

Any decent photo organiser will allow you to recognise and mark up your good ones, without you having to throw away the rest "just in case..."

But filtered bad photos are still bad photos. Why keep bad photos? The "just in case" argument just doesn't hold water to me. You're welcome to keep all your images, but maybe give that article another read...

[cml]

I delete a number of my "good" photographs, once I get a chance to come home and get a good look at them. However, I have learned that I should NOT delete things on the portable device. Some of the best pictures I've taken have looked exceedingly average on the small screen of the portable device. More than one have barely escaped the culling I used to do on the device. You can delete the obvious mis-fires on the portable device, but give everything else at least a chance.

[Jason Dunn]

You can delete the obvious mis-fires on the portable device, but give everything else at least a chance.

Oh yeah, absolutely - I rarely do ANY deleting on my camera, and definitely don't try to make judgement calls about good/bad photos until I get back to my laptop/desktop PC.

[greenup]

I disagree with some elements from the article:
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.

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.
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[greenup]

oh look, there's a big old discussion under the article, mentioning many of the things I pointed out. :oops:

after I read through all of that, maybe I'll weigh in over there.

[Jason Dunn]

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.

I disagree. All you're doing is hiding the bad photos, and if you move to a new software program, you'll quite likely lose all those ratings/filters. You end up with an unmanagable mess of photos. I believe it's far better to delete bad photos as part of your editing process. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of putting your dirty laundy in the closet so that things look better on the outside but guess what, you still have dirty laundry, and eventually you have to stop moving it from room to room and deal with it. ;-)

[greenup]

"hiding": I prefer to think of it as "saving for later possible use"
"move": well, there are three ways of coping with that...
1. don't move. ever.
2. choose an organizer that has an EXCELLENT export, or uses a database format that is open, so a good export can be made. (oh, adobe, why must you fail so hard in this area? &lt;/lament> )
3. reorganize the mess every time you migrate. It's good for you. Builds character. :roll: :wink:

actually, there's one more... that I sadly use, while waiting/working on the Greenup Asset Management system (tm) :-)
4. keep the "negatives" over here in this pile, and the "proofs/prints" in that pile. periodically go through the last 3 months of negatives &amp; improve them as necessary, copy them to "proofs", and print a few copies for grandma. Use "proofs" on the family website. Share them. whatever; just mostly ignore (except periodically refreshing the DVD backups) the negatives.

[Stik]

Jason,

Thanks for publishing this article!

My dear wife is an absolute FANATIC of taking digital pictures of waves and sunsets. I would guesstimate they've run into the thousands over the course of years ( pre-digital &amp; digital ), stored on the computer, in CD's, in drawers, boxes, photo albums you name it! :crazyeyes:

I ' gently persuaded ' her to sit down and read the article, and she laughed and giggled the whole way thru it ending with, " Thats me, I'm scared to delete!. "

Anyhoo, the point was made like I never could do, 8O and I think the article will leave a lasting impression and hopefully cause a change in the clicking/deleteing process in the future. We had a very nice discussion on the topic when she was finished reading. She has taken some excellent photos I'll admit, just has gone a little overboard, imo.

Now, if I could only find a way to keep her from collecting coffee cups ! :lol: