Do you keep failures?

[Rob C]

If something I shoot is crap, it’s gone.  If there’s something to have been learned about “why” what I shot was crap, and if I’m too dense to remember it, then I deserve whatever more crap I shoot in the same circumstances.

I’m a scorched earth kind of guy.

If something I shoot “doesn’t work exactly” in my first “go” at editing, but I sense it might be something,  I’ll keep it for a while and revisit.  On second or third look, if nothing comes . . . It’s gonzo!

I’m a firm believer that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken s*^t.

 

Rand

But don't bet the ranch on chicken curry. Or soup. Go with your eye, not your nose, which is why you're safe(ish) with the salad.

;-)

[Rand47]

But don't bet the ranch on chicken curry. Or soup. Go with your eye, not your nose, which is why you're safe(ish) with the salad.

;-)

 

Rand

[Jeremy Roussak]

If I didn't, I'd need an awful lot less disk space.

Jeremy

[ShirleyB]

I have in the past kept most, other than the obvious failures such as really off composition, or blurry or I took 3 slightly different compositions and one is definitely a no.  Lately though I have been deleting in Lightroom when I come across them, as I go through looking for something else. I have kept before because I love what made me take it,  but it doesn't matter how many times you try to rework it, it still doesn't work. If it didn't make the grade during the other reviews I have done, it's not worth keeping...delete.  What that does is make more efficient use of your time, because if all the bad ones are gone, it is much faster to go through the ones that are potentials for good.  I learned that from Seth Resnick.  I ask myself, "is this a Wow or is it just OK" Wow keep..... just OK delete.  Actually look at the subject line... do you keep your failures....that tells you all you need to know...FAILURES, not do you keep your potentials for success. I have thousands of pictures, if I edit better then I don't waste tome reviewing the one that aren't going anywhere, over and over

[faberryman]

I work on a project by project basis. I go through my images and select a very small subset to process, export them as tifs to a final project folder, and print them. I don't spend time going back and deleting the rejects or mining old photos. I am off on the next project. If you are spending time looking at old photos, I think you are better off going out and shooting something new. But everyone works differently.

[stamper]

Looking at photos months/years after you have have taken them means that you see them differently. There isn't any emotional attachment that was was there when you captured the image. Objectivity is important when assessing the merits of an image.

[Martin Kristiansen]

Looking at photos months/years after you have have taken them means that you see them differently. There isn't any emotional attachment that was was there when you captured the image. Objectivity is important when assessing the merits of an image.

I have a particular style of photography I am always drawn to and shoot over and over. When I am working on a project I will shoot perhaps 10 images of a scene, three are OK and at least 4 fall into that style that I shoot over and over. I call it deadly dull or “why the hell did I shoot that”. Looking at them I will look at things like focal length and so on to see where I am missing. I have learnt a lot.

 I almost always fail with very wide apertures. I no longer buy those lenses. I always fail with long lenses.  I now use long lenses for commercial work almost exclusivly where it is often required for technical reasons. Macros are a total waste of time for me, I shoot them to play with gear and get my eye in only. Other areas I notice is I always pay careful attention to background but frequently neglect the foreground.  All this from looking at failures. Very valuable.

[Riaan van Wyk]

I don't keep any. Almost everything ( landscapes) I shoot is off a tripod with compositions I considered to be worthwhile at the time, if I get home and find it's crap everything will be deleted as it then meant I wasn't concentrating. It won't look any better two years later.

[Rob C]

I have a particular style of photography I am always drawn to and shoot over and over. When I am working on a project I will shoot perhaps 10 images of a scene, three are OK and at least 4 fall into that style that I shoot over and over. I call it deadly dull or “why the hell did I shoot that”. Looking at them I will look at things like focal length and so on to see where I am missing. I have learnt a lot.

 I almost always fail with very wide apertures. I no longer buy those lenses. I always fail with long lenses.  I now use long lenses for commercial work almost exclusivly where it is often required for technical reasons. Macros are a total waste of time for me, I shoot them to play with gear and get my eye in only. Other areas I notice is I always pay careful attention to background but frequently neglect the foreground.  All this from looking at failures. Very valuable.

The style you shoot in "over and over" may not be dull at all, just familiar. If it's where your heart is, maybe you will find greater satisfaction going with it and developing it further instead.

Rob

[Martin Kristiansen]

The style you shoot in "over and over" may not be dull at all, just familiar. If it's where your heart is, maybe you will find greater satisfaction going with it and developing it further instead.

Rob

Thank you Rob for that observation. I will give that some thought.

[NancyP]

Depends. If it is a conscious technical experiment, I keep it as a reminder of misapplied settings or of equipment limitations (eg, testing lens for coma, flare, etc). If nature photography featuring a specific organism, I keep technically bad shots that show interesting behavior, or boring shots showing anatomic feature well (bird species get 1 good "butt shot" for record of tail plumage; leaf and stem arrangement on wildflower, in addition to the actual flower, for aid in identification), or ecology of location of the organism, or just a site shot with coordinates (for returning to site later).

I weed out "near-duplicates" a lot. Freehand shooting of birds, freehand close-ups, any macro when a breeze is blowing - there will be a bunch of similar not-technically-ideal shots. Out they go, unless there is something interesting in the not-technically-ideal shot that I might want to follow up (what's that pollinator insect on the wildflower).

If I didn't do rapid rough cuts, I would be swamped. Back up "all" on one drive, just in order to have two copies (computer drive and back up drive) and clear the cards. I flag rejects in Lightroom on a quick first pass. Then I check my flagged shots again, and pitch. At least 50% of shots are gone. The remainder get more thoughtful evaluation, and I am not in a big hurry to ditch.

There's a dandy phone photo app called "Theodolite", gives you compass info (altitude, azimuth, elevation), time, date embedded into photo. The main use is for landscape shot planning. I may see an interesting location at an uninteresting time of day. What would it look like with Milky Way in background? or how would sun hit it at a particular time of day and date? Easier to take the phone snapshot than record manually using physical compass and gps.

[KLaban]

I learn as much from my mistakes as I do my successes.

[Tony Jay]

Ultimately, I have a very ruthless approach to culling images, but it is not a hasty approach.

I will usually end up with only 10%, or less, of the images from a particular shoot. However, I only delete obvious failures up front, the rest I evaluate over a long period of time (typically over a year). This gives enough time adopt a more objective approach to judging an images worth...

I took to this approach in an attempt to improve my photography. By only keeping the small percentage of stuff that at least approached what I wanted to achieve, and still seeing plenty of flaws in most of those images, was the motivation to change my approach and to try different things....

Also, a fair percentage of my photography is bird and wildlife. At one point in time the only shot I had of a leopard was a single rather poor, and slightly blurred, image. However, because it was the best leopard image I had at the time, it survived! Thankfully, now, it has been culled because I have been able to replace it with much better images of leopards that go way beyond being mere "animal portraits"...

However, recently, I have taken to preserving a few poor images that well demonstrate common mistakes that are made, or perhaps just the ones that I tend to make(!), for teaching purposes.

Nonetheless, my Lightroom catalog only holds significantly less than 10% of all the images I have ever shot. Particularly the early stuff that I shot was just hideous, both from a technical and aesthetic point of view, but at least I learned from that...