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Author Topic: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?  (Read 5256 times)

dreed

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To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« on: March 23, 2016, 07:24:21 am »

To help keep the number of my digital assets under control I make an effort to clean up photographs that don't work, blur, etc.

But it occurs to me that if I only keep those then I may forget what didn't work and see a gap in a style/framing later and re-try it only to rediscover that something doesn't work.

In light of that, is it better to keep one or two samples of something that doesn't work?
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Colorado David

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2016, 09:32:22 am »

Several years ago I attended a presentation by Peter Krogh. This might have been 2007 or around that time. Almost ten years ago. He admonished the group to never throw anything away. He added that as cheap as storage had become, there was no need to throw away your raw card data. Keep mistakes and in camera similars. Just use a deliberate method of rating and organizing your library. I asked him about a particular situation. I was getting on a bus in South America with a colleague and a woman also boarding the bus bumped into him. His camera, on a sling around his neck, fired off a three shot burst of the floor of the bus. Krogh said keep them.

RSL

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2016, 09:38:52 am »

If I kept all my mistakes I'd need a warehouse to house the servers storing them. I'd agree that some mistakes are worth keeping, just to remind you not to do that again. But then, what the hell? Who's gonna check their mistakes before they make the next one?
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RSL

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #3 on: March 23, 2016, 09:58:01 am »

How about the shots of the sidewalk and your foot you've made by bumping the vertical shutter release on your D2x, D3, D4, D5, Keith? Do you keep those too.

The stuff I keep -- which, I'll admit is the vast majority of what I shoot -- goes into three backups, one offsite. But there's plenty of crap that obviously, on the face of it, isn't worth keeping. I also have a vast library of film with plenty of grossly out of focus, underexposed, overexposed, etc. stuff I can't get rid of without chopping up all the strips they live in. Happily, after scanning what I want to keep, I've been able to give the film to my kids to store. They'll probably dump it when I'm gone.
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langier

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2016, 10:17:53 am »

In the 1990s Dirk Halstead and others were shooting Bill Clinton during the dawn of the digital photo era. Dirk kept all his photos (he was shooting film). Others in the pool were shooting digital. Digital then was expensive--cards held few photos, were slow, computer drives were in the megabytes... cards were downloaded, erased, put back into service with the runners. Images were cherry picked, sent on the wires and all the rejects were erased to save space and bandwidth.

Then Monica spoke up and Bill Clinton wagged his finger in denial. All those digital files were long gone....erased. Dirk recalled seeing Monica's face before. His researcher looked at all his film and found not one pix of Bill and Monica embracing, but at least one more and they looked buddy-buddy in each. He wondered about all the others in his group standing and shooting from the same vantage point then realizing their images were all gone...
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RSL

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2016, 12:34:01 pm »

I remember those days. The D1 had a whole 2.27 megapixels. When the Casio QV3000EX point-and-shoot hit the market it was far in advance of the nearest "professional" cameras. Fortunately things have changed.
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Rob C

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #6 on: March 23, 2016, 01:01:42 pm »

That depends: today, I keep some that may work combined with something else, but then again, I'm not into machine-gunning - even when working (film) I'd shoot 36 trying for at least one, but they were all mostly around a single set-up on each cassette, and I'd select the best two or three. On a good day. I simply didn't shoot much that wasn't work.

Of the few work ones retained, the best would go to stock - when I had copyright - and most of those have been lost since I stopped bothering with stock: they came back to me complete with enough scratches to make them worthless to any other stock library. Made me wonder why more were scratched than ones that were reported as having been used...

That's one good thing about digi: as long as it lasts, you can keep a master and nobody else can scew it for you.

Rob C

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #7 on: March 23, 2016, 03:26:05 pm »

So much depends on subject. I can appreciate that if you're shooting models or any other moving target then you'll probably need to shoot more to be sure of nailing the shots.

Most of my work was static, I'd spend a long time working out the best viewpoint and wait for the best light, shoot three exposures and move on. I'd typically get four shots including bracketed exposures per 12 exposure film and be disappointed if I didn't nail all four.

I now find myself shooting more street including moving targets but still tend to shoot single shot and move on. Old habits die hard.

Truth to tell, I think we really define ourselves with our old habits; I'm sure it's practically impossible to change our spots!

Rob

RobSuch

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #8 on: March 24, 2016, 03:01:50 am »

Sounds like me. I used to paint in oils.

Never owned a D anything, but yup.

There again I'm the least prolific photographer I've ever known. When travelling abroad with the specific intent and purpose to make images an average days shooting will typically net one or two shots and a good day perhaps a handful. Often I won't even lift the camera to my eye.

The only thing I can put this down to is the background of a slow and methodical painter.
« Last Edit: March 24, 2016, 03:05:37 am by RobSuch »
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Petrus

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #9 on: March 24, 2016, 03:57:21 am »

Disc space is now cheaper than my time = I just keep all the files.

Sometimes I dig a bit and find useable stuff I had overlooked.

Also keeping everything is less stressful than deciding what to dump.
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Rob C

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #10 on: March 24, 2016, 05:24:55 am »

Part of the problem with storing everything is future time: does one often have either time or inclination to trawl back into old stuff? I had to when making the first part of my website, and it was an exercise in masochism.

It feels much better looking at fresh material, working on it and then forgetting it and moving on to the next thing. However, when there is no next thing, that's a time when old stuff assumes value.

Rob

Otto Phocus

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #11 on: March 24, 2016, 07:22:34 am »

Storage is not the issue.  Indexing and retrieval is the problem.

If the concept is that I should keep everything so I don't forget my mistakes, how exactly am I supposed to index and later retrieve my mistakes?

If I am going to go out tomorrow and photograph butterflies, is the intention for me to retrieve potentially hundreds of my lousy butterfly photographs and look at them and glean exactly what?

Personally, I don't have a problem remembering my photographic mistakes.  What I have a problem with is determining in the field, at the spur of the moment, how to prevent my mistakes.

In the "information age" (what ever that means), it is easy and cheap to store data.  Storing is not the problem. Technology takes care of that.  But not as many people are working the much more harder issues of indexing and retrieval.

It is all well and good to proclaim "save everything".  Especially since you saving everything you have does not cost me anything. But unless you put in some serious effort into indexing, all you will have is a large box o' data to sift through.

My personal workflow is to

1.  Immediately cull the obvious bad shots that really can't be fixed. These include just poor technique on my part.
2.  Get rid of duplicates i.e., multiple shots that really don't add anything specific from the other shots.

This usually gets me down to about 10%  :-[

Then I can really start culling down the technically competent but boring shots.

So I end up with about 1% which is pretty good for me.

I tend to save those 1% shots and never look at them again.   ;D
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stamper

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #12 on: March 24, 2016, 09:39:53 am »

Storage is not the issue.  Indexing and retrieval is the problem.

If the concept is that I should keep everything so I don't forget my mistakes, how exactly am I supposed to index and later retrieve my mistakes?

If I am going to go out tomorrow and photograph butterflies, is the intention for me to retrieve potentially hundreds of my lousy butterfly photographs and look at them and glean exactly what?

Personally, I don't have a problem remembering my photographic mistakes.  What I have a problem with is determining in the field, at the spur of the moment, how to prevent my mistakes.

In the "information age" (what ever that means), it is easy and cheap to store data.  Storing is not the problem. Technology takes care of that.  But not as many people are working the much more harder issues of indexing and retrieval.

It is all well and good to proclaim "save everything".  Especially since you saving everything you have does not cost me anything. But unless you put in some serious effort into indexing, all you will have is a large box o' data to sift through.

My personal workflow is to

1.  Immediately cull the obvious bad shots that really can't be fixed. These include just poor technique on my part.
2.  Get rid of duplicates i.e., multiple shots that really don't add anything specific from the other shots.

This usually gets me down to about 10%  :-[

Then I can really start culling down the technically competent but boring shots.

So I end up with about 1% which is pretty good for me.

I tend to save those 1% shots and never look at them again.   ;D

Couldn't have stated it better myself!

RSL

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #13 on: March 24, 2016, 10:50:39 am »

+1
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Petrus

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #14 on: March 24, 2016, 04:40:50 pm »

From my reportage assignments I might develop 2-5% of the frames, 0.2-1% gets published in print.
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MattBurt

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #15 on: March 24, 2016, 04:56:07 pm »

I throw out the obvious duds and probably keep more of the slight variations than I need to. But I tag in LR in hopes of being able to revisit them in the future if needed. I'm getting close to time to upgrade storage again and need to start thinking about that strategy and how to back it all up.
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-MattB

jeremyrh

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #16 on: April 07, 2016, 06:43:20 am »

For me it's not so much a matter of disk space, more of the balance of time taken to sort and eliminate images vs. the time taken to later find the good shots amidst the sea of rubbish.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: To keep mistakes as well as 'keepers'?
« Reply #17 on: April 07, 2016, 09:33:43 am »

I never throw any negative or raw file away, though I don't process more than a small fraction of them.

When I go back to look at old originals one or several years later, one of two things sometimes happen:

1.   My ego often gets a much-needed trimming as I am reminded of how much trash I wasted time and effort on in the past, and
2.   Every now and then I see that the version I originally chose to process is now "obviously" inferior to one of my "rejects" at the time.

-Eric
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