One mans trash is another mans treasure....................

[Barbara Ponder]

So I started thinking today (scary I know). Since opinions always vary on photos do you ever wish you could see what each of us calls our discard shots?

[Manfred M]

Nope - those are my dirty little secret...

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Much to my wife's chagrin, I hardly ever throw anything away, including my bad pictures.



What would you like to see?

[DanK]

I don't even like to look at them. I wouldn't impose them on others.

What might be more interesting is what I would call near misses--images that seemed good but that we could never get to be quite satisfactory.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Here're a few...

Opps, he walked in front of me


Too late...


uht...late again...


too soon...


See what I mean?
And those guys weren't even driving fast!

[Barbara Ponder]

Here're a few...

Opps, he walked in front of me


Too late...


uht...late again...


too soon...


See what I mean?
And those guys weren't even driving fast!

Those cars are AMAZING!!!!! Part of a club?

[AlwaysOnAuto]

You could say that, they were the cars entered in last years Pebble Beach Concours.

[Shadowman]

Here're a few...

Opps, he walked in front of me


Too late...


uht...late again...


too soon...


See what I mean?
And those guys weren't even driving fast!

I haven't attended a car show yet where the majority of the shots weren't near msses. Too bad they don't schedule them at later hours, I could set up a tripod and do a long exposure.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Some times I have a hard time fitting them in the frame they're so big...



Other times it's hard to make them look big enough to be real...

[IzzieK]

Oh....Alan...everytime I see a small car, I always wonder how the driver feels if s/he is stuck between 2 large trailer trucks on the freeway...

Anywhooo....it was only recently that I learned how to cull my shots from my camera. All my drives are full of good and bad shots that I always think that one day a software will come that will right the blurred movement either made by my shaky dakey hands or my camera's fault...I have to blame someone, something ... in the past. Now that I had improved a bit (thanks CiC!) I don't let the bad ones get in my hard drive anymore...and to borrow Greg's phrase...even hard drives have feelings too especially when you treat it like a rubbish bin...

[Barbara Ponder]

Anywhooo....it was only recently that I learned how to cull my shots from my camera. All my drives are full of good and bad shots that I always think that one day a software will come that will right the blurred movement either made by my shaky dakey hands or my camera's fault..

Izzie I know exactly what you are talking about. I just purchased a new computer as my last one could hold no more (at least that's what I told the hubby when making the sales pitch) I now use an external drive and only put a very few on my actual hard drive. Now what to do with the other external hard drive, it's photos and the old computers hard drive.......

[jcuknz]

Barbara .. I had my old HD installed on my old computer ...with the current one it has its little box and USB tethered to computer.
I suspect the first option is better as it used a spare plug on that 'wide strip of wires' connecting main HD and disc drives. ... but perhaps that is old technology.

EDIT .. I dump very rarely and have a copy with camera number in my 'archive' folders on external HD as brought up to the concept of the precious negative etc.
My wife is hopeless at keeping stuff /filing and many of her best shots are lost due to her culling ... I have given up commenting on her attitude but I think storage is so cheap these days ... when I started I paid almost the same in 'real money' for 64Kb of storage that I get oudles on a HD today .... a terrabyte for perhaps a couple of 64Gb cards
Then I spent three years of my younger life as a photo librarian so I guess I'm peculiar

[TheBigE]

Interesting Topic...just the other night I was watching a Video on KelbyOne about Composition, by Scott Kelby. I was not sure what to expect at first in the video, but figured it was worth a try as I am trying to improve my composition. He was very upfront in the beginning and talked about the basic rules of composition - Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, etc. This was only 5 minutes of the 1.5 hour course, that was it. Much of the video (and I have not finished the series) was not relying on the rules but how to find that composition in a scene. His examples is that great photographers do not just walk up and snap one photo and it is a prize winner....they have to look to find that photo in the scene. He then went on to talk about working a scene and taking many many photos and keep trying different things. H He had several examples, and he made the audience promise not to laugh at some of his bad photos in which he used to emphasize this point.

What was interesting to me was the numbers of photos he took overall on one subject alone (1950s Convertible Cadillac in Warehouse) - nearly 100+ photos. He was not stagnant and moved about up, down left right and in and out. He went through all his photos on this one subject, and it was interesting as some he thought were trash were treasures to me and vice versa. It gave me, as a relative newbie, a chance to reflect a bit more and realize that there was some truth to his methods and his results.

So it is easy to grab 100+ photos, storage is cheap so not an issue? Is it possible for a photo that is trash today to become a treasure tomorrow...maybe. But there will be other treasures.

For me, one point of advice that I received while early on is to cull my photos....I guess I agree with this, and really try to draw a line on what is good to keep or not. I become a bit harsh on my first go through of my images after downloading them....I reject a great deal and then delete them from my database. They are gone. Maybe I delete a winner, who knows, but in the end there will be others. I am looking to improve my workflow a bit to give at least one more pass on the ones that will be deleted. But in the end, they will be deleted to keep the database manageable.

Collecting photos is great, but as the database of photos grows, it become increasingly more difficult to find what you are looking for at any given moment. For me personally, this can be very frustrating. By deleting unwanted or what I perceive to be bad photos there is less in the database to catalog and the photos that exist are more focused.

That is us my thought...and I am sure I have deleted some treasures.

[chauncey]

Tis indeed a wise man that can see through another's eyes.

[topol]

Oh....Alan...everytime I see a small car, I always wonder how the driver feels if s/he is stuck between 2 large trailer trucks on the freeway... [...]

You should try the UK motorways - it's a way of life........

I was advised "take many - save few", which suits my tidy mind.
No doubt I'll live to regret it!

[NorthernFocus]

...do you ever wish you could see what each of us calls our discard shots?

I don't wonder so much about what they look like but I do wonder about what the cull ratio is for other wildlife photographers. One example that has caused me to waste untold amounts of time is discussing which AF mode to use for shooting BIF. Many Nikon shooters that I know seem to use 21 point dynamic focus when shooting BIF. And most of them tend to claim 90 percent in focus shots by doing so. Whenever I use that mode my hit ratio is about the inverse of that. I do much better using a single focus point. So I always wonder whether we have different standards of what we consider to be in focus or if I'm just really that bad at pointing the camera. I feel like I should be doing a better job of utilizing the technology of my equipment so every spring when the birds show up I go through the whole cycle again of trying all the different focus modes. And at the end of the exercise I end up back shooting single point. No doubt I'll do it again this year because I have a camera with Nikon's new "group" focus which I haven't tried yet.

...His examples is that great photographers do not just walk up and snap one photo and it is a prize winner....they have to look to find that photo in the scene...

I saw a similar presentation that Kelby did on a shoot he did at the Taj Mahal. With all due respect to the gent, he's not the most humble person on earth. When I watch his stuff my impression is that he portrays things as THE way to do this or that. As a matter of full disclosure, I liked the video because it was self-validating for me. Albeit with much less success, I tend to do what he portrayed. Perhaps because one thing we have in common is having come from technical backgrounds. But there are many artistically gifted people who can take one or two shots of the same scene and come away with a winner. That's not to say that they don't walk around and study the subject. But they recognize the scene that they want then and there. Not after the fact by picking it from a hundred shot taken from every conceivable angle.

[TheBigE]

I saw a similar presentation that Kelby did on a shoot he did at the Taj Mahal. With all due respect to the gent, he's not the most humble person on earth. When I watch his stuff my impression is that he portrays things as THE way to do this or that. As a matter of full disclosure, I liked the video because it was self-validating for me. Albeit with much less success, I tend to do what he portrayed. Perhaps because one thing we have in common is having come from technical backgrounds. But there are many artistically gifted people who can take one or two shots of the same scene and come away with a winner. That's not to say that they don't walk around and study the subject. But they recognize the scene that they want then and there. Not after the fact by picking it from a hundred shot taken from every conceivable angle.

Good points and I agree that coming from a technical background can be problematic is seeing the artistic viewpoint of a scene. It is a struggle for me....but I think just like any other skill this can be developed over time. For me the real eye opener was to not approach it in a single view point, but keep pushing to obtain different results and evaluate those results after the fact. In the end, I would hope that the number of shots would decay to a reasonable number....

[NorthernFocus]

... I agree that coming from a technical background can be problematic is seeing the artistic viewpoint of a scene....

Which begs the question, has the technical background made us that way or did we pursue technical careers because we were already so inclined ?

[TheBigE]

Which begs the question, has the technical background made us that way or did we pursue technical careers because we were already so inclined ?

The old Nature or Nurture discussion......I suppose digressing a bit from the OP, so I will be brief - I believe the answer is the last half of your statement above:

....did we pursue technical careers because we were already so inclined ?

Inclined to begin with and then enhanced and developed with a technical career.

We return you to your normally scheduled program.

[Venser]

At home, my wife and I disagree all the time about which photos to print for our walls. Some of my favourite shots she would delete in a heartbeat and vice versa. Since they're my photos, I ultimately make the final decision, but needless to say we argue all the time about this.

Here are photos my wife thinks are insta-deletes that I've hung on our wall.






Yes, I have a thing for camping out and taking photos of people in public. My wife hates them, but they're my favourite genre/subject. There's something about the look of their faces I find captivating and can look at them all day long.

Do I want to see others rejects? No. There's a reason they're not shown, the artist didn't like 'em. In the end, you're defined by what you expose to the public. Keeping a tight control on that is important. I think keeping the junk private and throwing them out is the best option.