UPDATE: I wouldn’t advocate deleting like this normally. This was an exercise in pushing myself to take better photos. Most of the time I don’t delete more than the seriously out of focus photos, and I just select the best for processing. I find it’s good to revisit my ‘bad’ photos, identify what went wrong, and figure out what I need to work on.
One thing I am seriously guilty of is not narrowing down the number of photographs I keep after shooting. I don’t mean deleting on camera – I’ve had some serious issues with doing that and the memory card becoming unusable until formatted (don’t risk it!).
Once I’ve downloaded my photos, I tend to skip over going through and throwing out the garbage in favour of excitedly processing my favourites. Which results in my hard drives being full of photos that will never see the light of day because they aren’t worth processing. I do bin obviously blurry and under/over exposed photographs, but that still leaves a lot that are technically alright but otherwise uninspiring.
So why don’t I throw them away? It’s time consuming, and I’m an incurable sentimental. It’s not a good combination. When I finally get the time and motivation to thin out my library of photos, I don’t have the heart to toss some because of the memories I associate with them. Which is pointless, because I never look at them anyway.
I’m going to start an exercise where I have to delete the detritus before processing the gems. Wrong wing position? Gone. No catch-light in eye? Gone. Bad composition? Gone.
I’ve got my strategy sorted:
- Delete obviously blurry, badly exposed otherwise bad photographs.
- Mark out ones for consideration for processing.
- Get rid of borderline photographs – awkward subject position, bad composition, unnecessary duplicates of same scene
- Rationalise ones that ‘might’ be nice – are they worth the effort (probably not, get rid of them)
- Process the best!
Goals for next year:
– take more (better) photographs – delete more photographs – process less – only the best –
