Don’t Delete Your Digital Photography Mistakes Too Quickly
A few years ago while on a tour in Morocco with a group of others I sat next to a fellow traveler on a tour bus. He was quickly scrolling through the shots he’d taken on his camera – deleting picture after picture.
I asked him what he was doing and he told me that he was ‘culling’ shots to make more room on his memory card. As I watched him I wondered how much he could tell about the shots he was deleting from his camera’s little 2 inch LCD.
While I understand the feeling of getting to the end of a memory cards capacity when you want to take more shots – if you do have the space on your memory card I would recommend that you don’t delete too many shots while you’re out and about and wait until you get back to your computer to do so.
The reason I suggest waiting is that quite often some of the ‘mistake’ shots can actually end up being some of your best (sometimes in quite a in an abstract sort of way).
When you look at images on your camera’s LCD the photo is obviously quite compressed and you can sometimes not see details that you would when you view it on your computer. There may actually be something quite useful tucked away in the details that you’ll never know about if you delete too quickly.
For example – the picture on this post was taken on the streets in Morocco on that same trip. It was taken on my first little point and shoot digital camera (A Canon Powershot A60). It was actually a complete accident that I took the shot (I thought I was turning the camera off when I was actually pressing the shutter). At first glance it is an out of focus and poorly framed shot (actually it’s that on a second look too) but there’s something about this shot that keeps drawing me back to it.
It won’t win any awards but it is a shot that means something quite powerful to me and which is something that evokes a lot of memories for me.
I’m glad I didn’t join my fellow travellor in his picture cull that day because I’d probably have deleted this one.
Tags: Deleting Photos, Mistakes
26 Responses to “Don’t Delete Your Digital Photography Mistakes Too Quickly” - Add Yours
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:43 am
I can see your point, and its a valid one, but I guess where I get eager to delete is if I don’t delete the “bad” shots immediately, they get imported into my library (iPhoto), and then when I want to find photos, I find myself going through several actually bad shots for a few good shots.
I know I can easily go through and delete the bad ones once I view them on a larger screen or have had time to soak them in – but the fact is by the time I find time to do just that, I’ve already accumulated quite a few hundred photos and then its a daunting task.
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:52 am
Whist the advice above is spot on and you shouldn’t delete anything until you have had a chance I find the best way of appearing to be a decent photographer is to only show people your best shots. Even just for a vaction album of slideshow you 25 best shots are much more powerfull that showing people all 500 that you actually took to get 25 good one.
http://jfletcherphoto.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/appear-to-be-better-than-you-are/
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:25 am
If i’m shooting continuous I’ll delete shots that are obviously very blurry or badly framed, but I’ll tend to keep everything else. After importing into Aperture I just hit 9 (for reject) on any photos that don’t make the mark or fail to interest me in some way, I very rarely delete the pictures completely.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:20 am
Fletch >> agreed re: 25 best vs all 500. I found that with my baby being born, he’s our first, and the first grandson and great grandson – thus the first day he was born alone there were 1600 pictures taken. Sadly, I”m not exaggerating. As I go through them, I’ve been deleting them, but honestly I just want about 50, just have to find them in the pile of photos I have.
February 3rd, 2009 at 5:54 am
You know, those of us who cut our teeth on 35mm roll film, never quite had the chance to “delete” a thing. We dutifully cut our roll into strips and filed them, in toto, in out negative file pages. Nothing was lost. Those shooting in medium and large format had greater ease at trashing the ashots, but I know of several studio photographers in Hollywood who kept every frame they ever shot.
For my own purposes, I keep adequate flash cards on hand as they have come down quite a bit in price, and everything I shoot get treated as a roll, and get saved as it comes off the camera. I select the shots I want to worik with, those that should be printed or need a little post to them, in a seperate file. The rest all stay, unchanged, and eventually wend their way to the hard drive.
One can never tell when that shot of Monica Lewinski that was not very good might be worth looking up in the file on the HD. And sometimes, it is fun to take the trash, and just fix it in post for some pretty and saleable piece of abstraction.
As to the Morocco street scene…looks like something Eisenstadt would have rendered.Not perfect, yet compelling.
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:35 am
One of the major do-not’s of taking digital photos in my opinion! I have taught most everybody I know not to delete anything before they get home. You just can’t know what it really looks like when you’re looking at it on your camera. Besides some of those “bad” shots could be salvaged in Photoshop. I never delete any photos at all, even photos of nothing or “bad” shots. Every photo is a memory, regardless of how “good” or “proper” it is, why throw away memories?
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Very, very true! The LCD can lie. I’ve seen so many shots thru it that I thought were great, only to view them on a monitor and see that I failed to get the focal point I wanted, etc. The opposite is also true, as this article points out. While bored once on vacation I took some panning shots on a rainy evening, I thought they were all terribly dark and blurred, but a couple of them are some of my favorite motion blur shots! I came close to deleting them in-camera.
February 4th, 2009 at 1:11 am
All valid points – and I can see why you wouldn’t want to delete a photo. This leads me to just having too many photos to sort through, and no way of organizing them.
I use iPhoto, don’t see a need for Aperture, or rather did not use it b/c it did not work with Front Row. But, now that Aperture does stream to my PS3 (thanks to MediaLink, everyone should buy this $20 app if they have a Mac and a PS3), maybe its time to move on to it.
February 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I delete photos that are obviously so over-exposed you can hardly discern what it’s a photo of. Underexposed photos can be saved by photo-manipulation programs; overexposed ones can’t be.
I also delete photos that obviously aren’t what I wanted: for example, if I’m taking a photo of a group of people and I’ve cut some people off the end, or there are people looking away, etc. Take another one :)
I tend to get frustrated with my mother who will take ten shots of the one thing- all framed the same way- but some might be blurred or overexposed or whatever- and she won’t delete the obviously bad ones. It’s a waste of space if you’re on a seven week holiday with few places to transfer your photos onto CD.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I don’t delete anything! Not even over-exposed shots! I took a really bad shot of my grand-daughter (she’s 2) It was badly overexposed on one side of her face and underexposed on the other side (because of the way the light was hitting her). Really a horrible shot. But I played with it in PhotoShop with textures and came out with an outstanding photo that I now have it printed and framed on my wall! And another printed and framed that I’m sending to my daughter and son-in-law. My daughter thinks it’s the greatest picture ever of her daughter……..all from a bad shot.
When I get home from shooting I go through the shots quickly and whatever catches my eye immediately gets saved into a new folder. Everything else is saved. I have 1.5 tb storage so I don’t have to worry about filling it up too quickly!!
February 5th, 2009 at 10:33 am
I try not to delete anything myself.
One of my favorite things to photograph is auto racing. I never know when I’ve made or missed a shot until I see it larger. However, I will delete photos of my “favorite driver.” Yep, the infamous “M.T. Track.”
Empty track photos aside, I’ve started to tinker with the better blurry ones and try to make them more artistic.
I burn my cards to DVD before I delete them, so if I accidentally delete something I wanted to save from my computer, I have an original to recover.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I rarely delete in camera just to save space. And I have found some wonderful “mistakes” that turned into something special with a little work. You never know what you’ll find once you get back to your computer, so I’m completely on board with the “don’t delete” group.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
I don’t even usually look at my shots on the camera screen unless I have a complicated shot to set up where I have to check the histograms. I’m always amused by the photographers around me who shoot, look, shoot, look, shoot, look, shoot, look, etc. I wonder how they managed before digital (not that I’m nostalgic).
But typically my camera’s screen is off. I frob its knobs the way I want and if I don’t get what I expected (rare) it’s
1. a surprise
2. a lesson
And small mistakes can be corrected in post.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:58 am
I shoot theatre & dance in, generally, darker conditions and I get many OOF shots, so I delete in-camera frequently. I don’t find that my LCD is so bad that I can’t distinguish a bad shot from a good one. Having said that, I was going to delete an entire shooting session with one of my models, but after looking again in photoshop (instead of my slide show program), half of the shots were usuable. So what I learned was to not only review the shots on the computer…but review them using quality software.
February 6th, 2009 at 8:28 am
I agree with you. The picture that you have gives a touch of mystery which may not taken again. It may cost somebody a thousand shots to have that same picture. Who would know that it was not taken intentionally but only you. For us, or maybe just for me, it is very nice picture it has drama and of good composition.
February 6th, 2009 at 9:10 am
I never delete fotos for the reasons above, but also for the worry that one slip of the finger can mean deleting one photo to ‘deleting all’. It has never happened, but why chance it eh? It’s much faster to delete on the computer than camera anyway.
February 7th, 2009 at 12:36 am
I am most definitely with the “not to delete” crowd on this one. If for nothing more than, it takes too much time to do in the field. I like to shoot landscapes primarily, and it can be tempting to delete the ones that “look the same”, but with a 42″ monitor you can see everything. The point made in one of the other comments is perhaps the best reason: you can fix most problems in post….. unless you erase it first. The only bad shot is the one you don’t take, and deleting it before you can really “see” it is the same thing. Every shot has something to be learned from it
February 7th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I learned NEVER to delete anything while on a shoot, as you can’t really judge from a 2.5″ screen what’s in the shot, invest in some extra memory cards and a portable disk backup device.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:50 am
I agree whole-heartedly. I still have many images that I just won’t let go of. Some for different reasons (saved to use later for creative incentives, etc . . . ). Also, sometimes a photo not quite in focus can be processed through a paint program (Essentials for example) and create quite a pleasing result. Also, with today’s memory cards you can get a slew of photos on one. I’m not a pro, so I don’t shoot thousands or even hundreds (dare I even say tens) of photos a day, so I’d rather wait to delete (if ever).
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Two photos, which I initially planned to delete, won first and third place in a photo contest. The lens flare enhanced the photo rather than detracted from it, and the high contrast and the position of the sun made the photos.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I absolutely agree with you on this … I used to delete images based on the quality I see on the view finder … but only to realize that few images that I thought were good actually turned out to be bad & There have been instences were it was the other way around.
Now I keep all the images and carry extra memory cards on long trips.
I know this is slightly off the topic but, I have also realized with the ease / cost effectiveness of digital we tend to go trigger happy … I can always delete right?
On the contrary I feel if you get selective about what to shoot more thought will go into the image composition and will definitely improve your output.
May 15th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I’ve kept reject digital photos from the “olden days”. As technology moved along, some were able to be fixed in the newer programs. I have also done this with audio files and have been delighted that my patience has paid off.
July 24th, 2009 at 2:57 am
I couldn’t agree more about waiting to delete photos, for a couple of other reasons. I am an “amateur photoshopper”. I create a lot of collages. Some of the “bad shots”, especially of colorful things like flowers/scenery, sometimes make great backgrounds for photos when a filter/blur is added to them and a gradient placed over them.
That being said, people have looked at me very weirdly, as I have taken pictures of brick walls, empty swimming pools, plain green grass, sand on a baseball diamond, and shadows of trees on a sidewalk. You never know what might make a great “texture” for a portrait background.
Also, some pictures that I think are blurred when I look at that little LCD screen are sometimes “out of focus” because my forehead has left sweaty, oily marks on the screen and turn out to be in focus after all.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Great reminder. I all too often unnecessarily delete stuff off if I’m out and about and bored. I have a 16GB card, so I haven’t even run into any space issues just being out for the day. I will save all shots until I get back to the big screen from now on! Thanks!
July 24th, 2009 at 10:05 am
I thought I took a lot of pictures, some of you have me beat by a lot. I think I took 1500 one day on vacation to the Blue Ridge Mountains. the most I’ve taken since, in a single day, was 655. I never delete until I get them home in my computer where I can make some kind of judgment.
the truly bad can be worked into some fantastic digital images when massaged with my Serif and Ulead photo programs. (Yes, I use 4 sometimes when one program won’t do what another will, or not as easily.) I own an old version of photoshop but it’s only on disc and not in my computer anymore.
Some results can be seen in my DigitalM gallery at imagekind.
I do a LOT of weeding. My old mind cannot keep up with settings and most of my images are ’snap shots’, seldom posed or even the time to pose them.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:53 pm
I like my new 2009 DeMarini Doublewall Pitch White CF3 composite baseball bat is designed like the original DXCFB but includes a carbon material that is 22% stronger than competitors’ composite materials.
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