Confession time why you so lazy?

[DirtySocks85]

I often feel that I may grow to appreciate a photo later. I always keep everything for at least 3 months, and then do a culling pass through on stuff that's older than that (a process I do about once a month). This way I don't delete something and then realize that I should have kept it later.

 

[gnd]

12 shots?
Sometimes it takes 12 shots just to produce one final image ... focus stack the foreground, exposure stacking for the sky, one shot for the sun star, one to remove flare from the sun star shot, maybe a few more for the middle ground pano ...
New school of landscape photography is all about "monaxial field of view augmentation, retroactive terrain proportioning, amalgamation of exposures, and the accumulation of focus points"

 

[needfx]

Snap pictures, store pictures, choose the picture, keep some relevant pictures in case I need a different portion of it for later post prod, delete excess and unusable pictures, make a file with that specific day/project/trip.

Currently, 255 pictures/videos on flickr, about a Tb of total pictures/videos.

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"monaxial field of view augmentation, retroactive terrain proportioning, amalgamation of exposures, and the accumulation of focus points"

sounds like fun

 

[BJMRamage]

I used to shoot film.

I'd come back from a short vacation (less than a week) and have 35-40 some rolls of film. Someone once saw my mass of film canisters trying to get them stuff in envelopes and comment that I must have done what they did recently and found a drawer full of used film...I told her, "nope, just a short vacation, I take a lot of shots." I don't simply shot the same-old stuff. Sometimes I see interesting shapes or colors and shot that. I once thought an castle with a golden glow looked neat against the bold blue sky and was taking photos, aimed high up the wall. People started to crowd around and asked my wife what i was shooting.

As far as digital. I do take a bunch too. The other day, I was out at a Garden/fountain area and I couldn't see the LCD screen (too bright) so I'd take a couple shots a lot tweaking between with what I hoped would make a decent photo. Now I try to RATE my photos and get rid of #1 or #2 rated shots. It is hard, Time constraints.

My excuse... Kids, Life, Work, wanting to relax a bit, Chores, I need some rest before starting over.

Though recently I went back 10 years or so and started to look through and quickly delete those "snapshot" type images that had little to no subject focus or were not IN focus. I try...I really do.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Snap pictures, store pictures, choose the picture, keep some relevant pictures in case I need a different portion of it for later post prod, delete excess and unusable pictures, make a file with that specific day/project/trip.

Currently, 255 pictures/videos on flickr, about a Tb of total pictures/videos.

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sounds like fun

Sounds more like I need a dictionary!

 

[nburwell]

I have a ton of RAW files that are saved on my external HD. Many of which do not see the light of day. I carefully go through my file and will post the images to my Flickr for those I deem worthy. I'm sure if I posted every single image I ever took, my Flickr photostream would be in the thousands right now.

I'm also very critical of my own work, so if I process something that I'm not happy with, I will not post it to any social media and/or Flickr/500px.

 

[DUCKofD3ATH]

My question: Why do you have so many photos and why don't you cull the bad ones (i.e. the majority of your pics)?

One of my jobs is graphics artist. As such, the photos I put up on flickr are intended to be used as stock images from which I can grab elements as needed. Many of the shots are crap, but may have a shade or texture I can use.

Waste not.

 

[AllergyDoc]

I like to keep only the photos I think I'll look at later, or appreciate later. Everything else gets moved to the trash can. This comes with experience. Another way to think about it is, which photos would you show to others? Most of the rest should probably be trash canned. If they're not good enough to show off, they're probably not good enough to keep.

My daughter-in-law, about 30 years old, bought a Canon 7D recently. She takes so many photographs she has no idea what she's got or what to do with them. She's put 12K shutter clicks on the camera already, most of them this summer. Heck, I sold a Nikon D80 I had for 9 years this year and it had less than 15K shutter clicks on it. I told her she needs to never use the continuous frame setting unless she's shooting sports. I think she'll just ignore me. She'll end up with a hard drive full of photos she never looks at.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

My question: Why do you have so many photos and why don't you cull the bad ones (i.e. the majority of your pics)?

I don't think I've taken that many photos in the last 40 years of shooting. I think if I was looking at a folder with 100,000 photos in it, I would shoot _myself_ next.

 

[Razeus]

I trimmed about 2TB of pictures down to about 500GB which I archived, then started a fresh LR library. I had a lot of stuff in there that downright awful, especially in my days as a beginner. I can tell it's nice to look back on that stuff though...

Sometimes it's not just about having just the keepers. Sometimes it's a timeline of your progression, or analyzing your stagnation. Sometimes it's analyzing why you took a certain photo. In the case of street photography, analyzing the light or catching the moment a split second too late.

 

[Meister]

...Sometimes it's not just about having just the keepers. Sometimes it's a timeline of your progression, or analyzing your stagnation. Sometimes it's analyzing why you took a certain photo. In the case of street photography, analyzing the light or catching the moment a split second too late.

Photos are also memories! Doesnt matter if they are total artistic crap.

I still have the first photo I ever took. I was eight and it was a selfy. Not very sharp and really underexposed.

 

[shinji]

Eh, it's a pain to go through them. I like taking pictures a lot more than I like hassling them with them afterwards. I just flag my favorites and that's that.

 

[glenthompson]

This is one of the reasons I have 3 Aperture libraries. One for my personal pictures, one for motorsports pix taken at our SCCA regional events, and one for eBay and Craigslist (downsizing and selling a bunch of stuff).

I rarely delete from the personal stuff expect for the really bad pix. After the motorsports pix are uploaded to Flickr I usually delete them expect for any really good ones I might want to keep. The eBay and Craigslist pix are deleted after the items are sold.

 

[maflynn]

If an image is blurry, or other attributes that don't make it great for viewing, I delete it.

I mark images that I want to use for print or online, the others are still available, if I choose to "upgrade" them. I see no reason to delete them since storage is so cheap.

 

[roadbloc]

Can't be arsed. That said I have less than 500 photos in my iPhoto library. Not much of a photographer.

 

[Edge100]

I exclusively shoot film.

Yesterday, I sent in 9 rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film and 11 rolls of 10 exposure 120 film for processing. That's 434 frames, which I shot over about 4 weeks.

Of those 434 frames, I would say that roughly 1/4 will be bracketed exposures (I shoot slide film predominantly), so that's roughly 300 different images. Of those 300, another 1/3 are slight variations on the same composition (vertical vs. horizontal, slightly different perspectives, etc).

So overall, I've got about 200 unique compositions on those rolls.

Of those, I expect to have perhaps 25-30 print-worthy images; or, put another way, I expect about 5-7% of my original shutter clicks to result in images that I will show to other humans.

Of those 25-30, I expect 1-2 to be portfolio-worthy; images that I would consider submitting to a juried exhibition, for example. That is, and 1/2 of 1% of my shutter clicks. Even this might be pushing it; every year, I might add 3-5 images to my portfolio.

If I shot digital, I would expect this to be closer to 1/10 of 1%, simply because I'd be making a lot more original images (though no more print-worthy or portfolio-worthy images, in my experience).

Editing is hard, but the best artists edit ruthlessly.

 

[Oracle1729]

Confession time…why you so lazy?

Why so negative, why the bad connotations, and why the attacking tone?

I go through all my raw images in Bridge, use the star ratings to mark what's for print, what's for my online viewing, what's so-so, and what's junk. Then I edit the first two categories, save them as jpegs in a subdirectory of the raw files directory.

I don't delete anything, I have the original ratings and edits so it's very easy to go through my library and find stuff. The extra files do not get in the way, and storage space is so cheap why would I even want to delete the 1 and 2 star files?

In what way do you find my workflow lazy? What do I need to confess?

 

[kelub]

I've been on both sides of this topic. I'm just an amateur, so keep that in mind, but my typical workflow would be to take however many shots I feel are necessary at the time, go through them and mark the ones I really like, go through those and mark the images from that group that truly stand out, and then from those, pick 1-2 images from each "scene" that truly tell the story I'm trying to tell of that shoot.

Shooting other people's pictures and doing this is a lot easier. When I'm shooting pictures of, say, my kids at the beach on a special trip, it's a lot harder to delete the "less spectacular" images because they're still a memory. Now... sure, the out of focus images and whatnot I'll toss aside, but I may keep a "B roll" of images that aren't as aesthetically pleasing as my A-list images, maybe not the ones I'd print in a photo book, but they're still special memories.

The upside to the photo hoarding is when you come across a situation later in life that causes you to want to go back and find those B or C roll images. For example, my dad passed away unexpectedly at the end of 2012, and in going back to search for images of my dad with the family, I had found that there were some I had taken that were just casual informal shots of "people doing stuff" he was in. I had not marked them as ideal images because at the time I was post-processing the event they weren't the focus, but I was certainly glad I had the shots to go back to.

If I were recommending a post-processing data management workflow to a beginner, I'd recommend the A and B roll philosophy. Drill a shoot down to the best of the best and keep the "story" of the shoot crisp and clean, otherwise you'll bore your subjects; at the same time, keep a B roll of the really good (or sentimental but technically inferior) shots, maybe exported as jpg's or uploaded to a photo site or something. Discard the rest.

As far as portfolios or what you share with people (whether it's professionally or amateur) again I'd say: keep it clean and tell the story. It's unorganized and unseemly, IMO, to share out albums that are overflowing with images or repeat a theme needlessly.

 

[The Bad Guy]

Why so negative, why the bad connotations, and why the attacking tone?

Why the tears? It was merely a question.

I go through all my raw images in Bridge, use the star ratings to mark what's for print, what's for my online viewing, what's so-so, and what's junk. Then I edit the first two categories, save them as jpegs in a subdirectory of the raw files directory.

I don't delete anything, I have the original ratings and edits so it's very easy to go through my library and find stuff. The extra files do not get in the way, and storage space is so cheap why would I even want to delete the 1 and 2 star files?

In what way do you find my workflow lazy? What do I need to confess?

I've bolded why you're lazy.

 

[needfx]

[(x-y)*z]*n∫ab


x ; total amount of pictures
y ; total amount of presentable pictures
z ; hourly unit needed to decide on a single photograph. to-the-power-ups possible.
n ; anxiety indecisiveness disorderdifier
ab; procrastination tendency variable

reverse x|y for keepers calculation





n∝d∫(x)