Do you keep all your shots?

macs

macs

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Rich
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Just wondering if any of you keep all your shots you take?

I tend to take a whole load of shots when out and about and then go through them all when back at home and process some of the best, keep those and get rid of all the ones that I think are a bit naff and not worth the effort to process.

What do you do?
 
I normally take all shots in raw,
Transfer onto pc then edit the ones I like best, saving them in PSD and finished jpeg.

And will relook at the folder in a few months time to edit more or to remove all images beside back ups from the edited ones.
 
I normally delete the ones I do not like or look correct, once I have imported them to LR.
 
I delete around 90% of the shots I take (good job I am not using film!)

I am still very new to photography and while those 90% are usually exposed okay, in focus etc,. something about them doesn't work so they go to trash.

The difficulty for me is knowing what will make a good shot and then capturing it and I am very much in the learning stage but then guess this stage could be very long...
 
While I'm shooting I'll delete any obvious howlers in camera, I'll then import all of them into LR and reject the bad ones as I go through them. The rejected shots are then deleted.
 
I'm just getting to grips with LR but it seems a great programme to sort all your photos.
I tend to delete quite alot (same as above i'm fairly new to this so not a great retention ratio of photos).

Next stage is to get to the point where I store alot of them as jpeg and get rid of the larger raw files for disk space. Still to fully discover how i go about that though.
 
When I get home, I put the CF into my pc and view the images one by one and make a snap judgement there and then. Most of the time, I hit delete unless an image is really worth keeping, then it is transferred RAW without pp and kept.
 
Big_chief said:
I'm just getting to grips with LR but it seems a great programme to sort all your photos.
I tend to delete quite alot (same as above i'm fairly new to this so not a great retention ratio of photos).

Next stage is to get to the point where I store alot of them as jpeg and get rid of the larger raw files for disk space. Still to fully discover how i go about that though.
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Don't get too hung up on keeper rate as this will depend on what you're shooting....

For instance I took 528 photos at a local T20 cricket match and only kept around 160 of them.

Bear in mind that I was taking shots of pretty much every delivery, either batsman or bowler and at 8fps they soon add up and you only really need a few good shots of each player in action ;)

Same probably does for Wildlife photography too.

I don't agree with the "spray & pray" technique but there's nothing wrong with taking a lot more shots than you need to :)
 
My workflow -
Delete any mistakes or obvious bad shots in camera. When home, import into Lightroom, rejecting some at this stage. Once imported I use the compare function to keep the best in a group of similar photos. Then do quick edit and highlight any that I want to do a bit more work on.

I've found that as I (hopefully!) get better, I'm much more ruthless and delete photos that I would have kept previously, as I'm seeing problems with them.
 
delete the worst, boring stuff i tend to keep so i can process them at a later date when ive figured out what to do with them. seems a waste to throw it <all> away.
 
johnnypanic said:
My workflow -
Delete any mistakes or obvious bad shots in camera. When home, import into Lightroom, rejecting some at this stage. Once imported I use the compare function to keep the best in a group of similar photos. Then do quick edit and highlight any that I want to do a bit more work on.

I've found that as I (hopefully!) get better, I'm much more ruthless and delete photos that I would have kept previously, as I'm seeing problems with them.
Click to expand...

Hmmm not heard about this compare function...sounds handy!
 
Agree about not paying too much attention to the keeper rate. If I was doing landscape, I reckon i'd have a much higher keeper rate.

95% of mine are my 2 young daughters, so not an easy subject at the best of times.
My keeper rate is actually stayed about the same rate as when I started a couple of years ago, just that the keepers are getting better looking back at what I used to think was a decent photograph :) I am my own worst critic now and it needs much better than decent to be kept, I just have way to many otherwise.

With mine, if it's out of focus it's a straight bin. Storage space is so cheap now, but too many just becomes silly as you end up not appreciating some which are actually OK pics. If that makes sense. Got more than enough to document their lives which is my goal.

When my eldest was 1 in 2009, I had about 2000 pics of her first year (x10 for the amount binned!) that I thought were really quite good. Now there are a lot that I still think are very good, but most are snaps (not always a bad thing though, if it tells a story but noisey etc it can sometime be kept ahead of a pin sharp, popping but dull pic).

Another thing I noticed (I just cleaned my collection the other week - it took a week!), in 2009 there was a massive jump in quality as I moved from P&S (Canon G7, was a good camera actually) to Nikon D3000. Skills improved a lot around then, but the low light stuff is much better, and that was just on a D3000 ISO 1600, so just shows....much more of my photos 'pop' now, so it's going the right way.....you get more strict about what should be kept as standards increase, but I take way more photos as well.
 
I delete about 30-50% of my shots for being rubbish throughout the day/when I get back.

I process the remainder in Lightroom.

I make duplicates of the very best ones and put them in a sub-folder called Flickr, where they get resized to 1200px wide and hosted online.

I keep the remainder offline for sentimental value, etc.
 
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I keep them all. If i deleted the duff ones, I'd have nothing to look back on :D

I did delete loads recently taken over the past 12 months and try to be more ruthless and critical of my own attempts. Keeping some for sentimental reasons, regardless of how poor they are.
 
I get rid of loads of mine due to out of focus and not been interesting enough.
 
Why on earth would anyone keep ALL shots.......

.....unless they are superhuman with no crap shots?
 
Generally I keep any shot that's in focus and correctly exposed, so I've got plenty of rubbish, when I start running out of space I'll more delete stuff and start being more selective.
 
Guess it is just how different peoples mind work but I am interested to know why anyone woudl keep anything they don't think is a good photo. What are you ever going to do with it?
 
Indeed, my now criteria is 'would I ever print this and hang it on a wall' - if not, it's binned nowadays. It never used to be, and it gets silly keeping them IMO.

After taking a week of a lot of hours a day trawling 4 years worth of mainly junk (150Gb of a lot of 2Mb files from years ago isnt funny) and looking for keepers, i'm not doing that task again...too easy to build up mediocre images, especially with digital, and also if you are like me and fairly early on (only a couple of years doing this) so ability is still steadily increasing reasonably quickly/criteria becoming strict.

Other criteria for binning is - missed subject focus (unless really,really good story to the pic), do I have another similar? (often have sets of ~10 similar of the kids taken at that particular point, same poses etc), so bin 9 keep 1 sort of thing - the moment has been captured, good IQ (exposure, focus targer made, nice quality/direction of light), shows them wearing certain clothes etc for looking back on - job done, moment captured....

How many pics do i need of one of my girls sitting on the same bench, same time, same clothes (obviously), eating the same ice cream....years ago i would have 10 pics showing this :) ....silly.
 
I used to keep everything except the real bad ones, but a recent laptop failure has made me look carefully at what i've got.
I used to import in Canon Dpp adjust levels etc then save a jpeg copy so my wife could see them and share without opening a dedicated photo program.
When the laptop failed i found I had 250Gb of photos! I managed to get my hands on a Macbook pro and with a shiny, empty drive thought i'd go through my pics and get rid of the dross. I found I didn't need multiple photos of the same cars on the same bend at Goodwood over 3 days in RAW and jpeg.
I'm down to 180Gb now and still going!
A couple of things i've discovered with the Mac, Raw pictures will open automatically so I don't need a jpeg copy to show them or run a slideshow. iPhoto & aperture will automatically convert the file when uploading/exporting. In aperture even when editing a jpeg it gives you the option to 'create duplicate from original'.
 
Now you have a Mac it is only a matter of time before you start to wonder why others are finding things so difficult :)

The way they handle raw files is great and so quick and simple that it is hard to understand how people mention raw workflow time as a negative when using raw.

Enough of that, I will go back to my ilovemacs forum...
 
Well, I guess I'm in a pretty small minority here because I have a master of every digital image I've ever taken. These are stored in whatever format they came off the camera with a pretty even split between raw and jpg.

When I transfer files from the memory card to my computer they are automatically copied to a hard drive that only contains the masters, with a folder for each day.

At the same time they go onto another hard drive where they sit waiting to be culled/edited/sorted/stored. There are far fewer less images on this drive than on the masters one :D
 
Delete obvious in camera as I shoot, then when I get home, put them in Lightroom. I then do a pass and delete any out of focus, bad composition (that can't be cropped) etc. then go through again just to see I haven't missed any.
 
Will delete in camera if obvious focus is out, download to PC quick scan and delete something I do not like, maybe process some for printing on wall or flickr, then I have a look about a week later and delete more if needed and about once every 3 months I tend to do another run through and think why did i keep that carp :D

Its a funny thing but I find sometimes a bit later some of my pics have appeal to me, where as they may have not at first which is why I wait sometimes for the 3 month scan through :bonk:
 
I keep all mine. You can't learn from mistakes if you don't keep a copy of them :)

I have all my film ones so keeping all the digital ones seems sensible. Because I know I keep everything I'm generally slightly more selective and don't go mad with taking lots of the same thing.
 
As a beginner, most of my photos are taken on days out or holidays, except the worst ones in a group of similar photos, I tend to keep all of them. It helps me a lot too, going throw my early photos and reasoning what could I have done different as I learn more.
 
Quick look through in camera and delete the obvious tat,
On the pc I check through again and delete all the duplicates etc,
Should just be left with the single best versions of each shot, realise most are actually crap and delete them,

By now I'm down to about 5 which aren't too bad. Then I realise 4 of these are also fairly crap so delete these as well leaving me with 1 half decent shot.

This gets put into Elements and edited etc until it's as good as I can get it.

Then I delete that as well.

Who needs extra storage?!
 
richboyphoto said:
If you were using film, you'd be more selective and work for the shot.. not just machine gun that shutter ;)
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You are making an assumption that I machine gun the shutter.

I have never used burst mode, ever, not once. Each shot I take is selective and I may take 2 or 3 shots of the same thing but that is not common and I usually take one and move onto to the next.
I may go through 150 shots when I get home and they are all of different things but 90% haven't turned out as well as I'd hoped (mostly from a composition or interest point of view rather than technical errors)

I delete around 90% as I am a very decisive person (who also hates clutter and disorder - mild autism!) and if I don't really like a shot it gets deleted. I don't hum and har, I make an instant decision and if it is not good enough it is straight in trash.

I don't really look at the shots on the camera and don't delete at source as I find it better to look at the full size shots on a computer when I get home as the whole process is much quicker and easier (tab to next shot, press delete) so all of my shots come home with me.

Interestingly enough I was using film a few months ago and found I typically liked about 4 photos from 36.

One last point, if I went through the 10000s of shots of the people who keep all of their shots I would most probably delete 90% of those too. Not because they are bad photographers (they are very likely to be better than me!) but because the shot does not warrant keeping.

Sorry, went a bit ranty - not intended at you - just wanted to give the background to why I delete so many :)
 
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macs said:
Just wondering if any of you keep all your shots you take?

I tend to take a whole load of shots when out and about and then go through them all when back at home and process some of the best, keep those and get rid of all the ones that I think are a bit naff and not worth the effort to process.

What do you do?
Click to expand...

I have not read all of this thread so sorry if it has been said. I delete the out of focus or just plain awful ones right away. The rest I keep for deletion or keepers later. I find that I don't always see hidden qualities in shots the first time I look at them. Sometimes I think they are keepers at first and come back later and realize that they are not. For me it's hard to analyze 50 or 60 shots after shooting for 5 hours when I am tired.
 
I normally keep everything as i tend to revisit a lot of them whenever i learn something new in pp.
 
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ernesto said:
You are making an assumption that I machine gun the shutter.

I have never used burst mode, ever, not once. Each shot I take is selective and I may take 2 or 3 shots of the same thing but that is not common and I usually take one and move onto to the next.
I may go through 150 shots when I get home and they are all of different things but 90% haven't turned out as well as I'd hoped (mostly from a composition or interest point of view rather than technical errors)

I delete around 90% as I am a very decisive person (who also hates clutter and disorder - mild autism!) and if I don't really like a shot it gets deleted. I don't hum and har, I make an instant decision and if it is not good enough it is straight in trash.

I don't really look at the shots on the camera and don't delete at source as I find it better to look at the full size shots on a computer when I get home as the whole process is much quicker and easier (tab to next shot, press delete) so all of my shots come home with me.

Interestingly enough I was using film a few months ago and found I typically liked about 4 photos from 36.

One last point, if I went through the 10000s of shots of the people who keep all of their shots I would most probably delete 90% of those too. Not because they are bad photographers (they are very likely to be better than me!) but because the shot does not warrant keeping.

Sorry, went a bit ranty - not intended at you - just wanted to give the background to why I delete so many :)
Click to expand...

the ';)' was to show i was joking, Sorry if you took offence.
 
No offence taken, thought it was worthwhile explaining the logic behind a lot of deleting, espespecially in the face of all the hoarders. :)
 
My keeper rate is a lot lower than when I was using a 35mm SLR.
 
hmmmm i had to have a think about this and its kinda changed how im storing photos.

I used to be a "I store every photo I take just incase I can recover it in photoshop" but since i picked up my SLR i have changed my mind.

For example - at a wedding I was at 3 or 4 weeks ago I took around 500 pics (I was there as a guest) Most of these were blurred, out of focus or unrecoverable in Lightroom. Therefore I deleted them. i now have 150 photos that i really like and once i showed them to the bride and groom they offered to take some of them (im not charging) for the album.

So in reality I have taken around 70gb's of photos in 4 weeks and cut it down to 10gbs. I think im gonna have to keep doing this as some photos really arent worth keeping
 
Depending on time I will delete any really bad ones in camera, delete out of focus etc in LR but keep a lot more than I should on the assumption that bits of photos can come in useful at later times when I am putting together a picture in PS - might take a bird from one, branch or flower from another etc
 
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