A Question of Quantity

[Michael Fanelli]

For almost everyone, a digital camera owner increases his/her number of shots by magnitudes over film. It is easy to shoot hundreds, sometimes thousands, of shots in a very short period of time.

A few posts in the last few months have mentioned storage of digital images. The answers involved lots of storage space and elaborate naming and cataloging efforts. The bottom line seemed to be that almost every shot is kept.

I throw away many, many more digital images than I keep. Years and years ago, at a seminar, John Shaw said something along the lines of "Bad and mediocre photographs are not like wine, they don't improve with age." He was a big fan of dumping the junk.

The power of digital lies in the fact that you can experiment and retake until you get a few that look the way you want them to. But now, its seems to me perhaps incorrectly, that many photographers just keep everything, good, bad, and indifferent. Quantity, not quality.

So here's my question: how many of you keep every, or almost every, shot you make with a digital camera? Why? Am I missing something (be polite)? How many of you ruthlessly cull the keepers and delete all the rest of the junk?

[Sebastian]

Images DO get better with age, simply because tastes, styles and aesthetics change. Imagine all those fashion shooters who decades ago threw out images with cut-off heads, shallow DOF and blown-out highlights, and look how much of that now saturates the pages of our magazines.

It it's anything more than a mistake on my part or the cameras, it stays.

[another view]

How many of you ruthlessly cull the keepers and delete all the rest of the junk?

That's me. Well, maybe not ruthless but I never keep bad slides or bad digital files. In my definition, "bad" means that I either didn't get what I wanted or it wasn't one of those accident shots that's actually pretty cool.

Sometimes I find I shoot less with digital too. I usually check the LCD for the first couple of shots in an unfamiliar situation to make sure that what I'm doing is working. If it's not, make changes and try again. With film, I don't have that luxury so I might try a few different techniques to make sure I get some results.