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 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 photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his wonderful son, and his sometimes obedient dog. He continues to cull his photos.

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