I think that’s a healthy obsession, because it simply means you’re passionate about your results and dying to find out if you captured that sight just the way you saw it with your own eyes.
However, this rush to review your photos will often cause you to overlook some of your greatest shots. That’s why it’s important to keep all your photos and look at them again–a few weeks, or even months after you first took them.
For example, when I first shot the photo above of the Providence Mountains in the Mojave Desert over a year ago, I didn’t think much of it. But, a couple weeks ago I was looking through some of my older photos and changed my mind about this image. Now I think it’s a pretty good shot.
It may be tempting to delete all the photos you don’t like at first, but keeping them and going back to look at them again is a good idea for at least two reasons:
1. You’ll be looking at them with fresh eyes, so what didn’t look good a couple months ago might look great today!
2. You may have learned something new since you took the photo, so you’ll know how to post-process it now, or you may even recognize what went wrong in the photo and use it as an inspiration for new composition ideas.
So, keep all your photos (even if you think they’re bad at first), and keep going back to look through them. Sometimes you’ll find a new gem in there!
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About the Author: Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, computer scientist, and founder of PhotoNaturalist. You can usually find him hiking in the beautiful mountains and deserts of Southern California.
Steve, if I may, that is one great shot. I do come right to my computer and delete many of my shots. The other day I took 256 pics and when I was though, I only had 32 pics. left.
Thank you for that tip.
Mitchell
I too, immediately review once ‘back home’: as you say, just too excited. I also try to limit myself to deleting only the OOF and seriously messed up photos.
I don’t delete all of the OOF, since some might have a motion blur or other ‘feel’ to them, and I don’t delete the ones that might be low-key or hi-key possibles.
I also go back about a month later and trim more, and then about once a year go through all my images and trim more. As Mitchell said, I also try to get down to a real core of images (as few as possible), but only after at least a month, and then again a year later. Of course, your vision may have changed a year later and you might keep some you had or would delete previously.
Like you Steve, I’ve found images that I hadn’t fully appreciated originally. However, the other side of the coin is storage capacity. I’m constantly dealing with that. I have two big data drives now, but I know I’ll be facing capacity problems again.
I’m with Hagen; I’ll delete anything that has serious, unintentional, technical flaws, everything else stays. I’ve found when I look at images immediately after a shoot, is that I’m judging the images based on what I was attempting to achieve, rather than evaluating it for what it is. As time passes though, I tend to forget what my goals for that day may have been, and look at the image for what it contains not for what it says about my success or failure that day.
Steve,
That is such great advice. When importing images, I make a second copy to a separate hard drive and never delete them. I do tend to have a heavy hand on the delete key when viewing images. Many times I am amazed at the good images that I had originally deleted from the laptop .during the first review.
I keep almost everything for a couple of reasons not mentioned. Hard drive space has come way down in price over the last few years so storing all of those files isn’t a huge expense anymore. Another reason I keep them is because you never know what someone else is going to like. For example, I had a client who wanted a photo of a moose. At the time, I only had 1 or 2 moose photos that I thought were worthy of printing and sharing. The client wanted to see what else I had so I was able to go back to my archives, and build a gallery of moose images for him. Sure enough, he picked an image and ordered a print that I felt was not worth doing anything with a the time. Another time I had a coworker ask for images to be used on a catalog cover. Again, he choose an image that I didn’t think was worth doing anything with and it was printed as a catalog cover that was shipped to a few million homes.
@Mitchell – Thanks!
@Hagen – Good point about the out-of-focus and “messed up” photos 😉 I delete most of those too, although sometimes I save them if I think they can help explain a concept in a PN post someday.
@Jim – Great point about storing all those extra photos. They definitely fill up hard drives pretty quick, but 500GB drives are fairly cheap these days, so if you’re shooting less than 16GB of photos per week, I think it’s still worth it to save most of the photos.
@Marcus – I think one of your sentences perfectly sums up what I was trying to say with this post: “I’ve found when I look at images immediately after a shoot, is that I’m judging the images based on what I was attempting to achieve, rather than evaluating it for what it is.” 🙂
@Nancy – That’s a pretty cool idea: separating your discarded images from the ones you originally liked. I kind of do something similar by just adding a color label to the image files I like at first (I think this is only possible on a Mac though)..
@Michael – Excellent point–I didn’t think about that at all. I’ve always thought it was interesting though how some people love a particular photo of mine that I think is horrible.
Steve, I think your post and the comments have the makings for another blog. The next one should be about how to store images and back them up. Some people don’t keep images on their internal drives. Others do, of course. I have two 2TB internal drives with four 2TB ESATA drives backing up the internals. Others use a NAS. Seems like the topic of storage and backup would make for a good discussion.
@Jim – Great idea. Matthew Fletcher actually wrote about storage and backup here on PN awhile ago:
https://photonaturalist.com/guide-to-storing-and-backing-up-your-photos-part-1-of-2/
https://photonaturalist.com/guide-to-storing-and-backing-up-your-photos-part-2-of-2/
But, perhaps it’s time for an updated post.