I'm curious how many people keep all of their photos from their shoots, or do you filter and delete in lightroom after you import? Obviously out of focus and photos with clipped highlights that can't be recovered are usually discarded, but how many of you keep most of your shots from a particular shoot, even if only one or two might go to post and printing.
I don't keep all of mine, only a fraction. I will generally take several that are similar, and I will pick the one or few that are the best and discard the others. I do sometimes keep OOF shots, or ones that are incorrectly exposed because photo editing software is becoming better and better. One day OOF shots may be fixable.
I think obviously horrible shots should be deleted, but there are too many times where you shoot something today that you won't recognize for some years as being much better than you realized at the time, and if you deleted it now, it's gone for good. Twice in the last year this has happened when I went back and looked at old proof sheets, and found shots of Lyle Lovett and Chris Hillman that we simply overlooked at the time, but really jumped out at me now. I was probably shooting at a higher level intuitively at the time and it took a couple of decades for me to catch up with the inner me.
I delete the black frames, pictures of my feet, the studio backdrop, etc. But I don't delete pictures. As Peter says sometimes you come back to a photo with a new eye or attitude. I find that as my post processing skills improve, I can go back and process previous rejects into acceptability.
cwebster wrote:
I delete the black frames, pictures of my feet, the studio backdrop, etc. But I don't delete pictures. As Peter says sometimes you come back to a photo with a new eye or attitude. I find that as my post processing skills improve, I can go back and process previous rejects into acceptability.
Hard disk storage space is cheap.
<Chas>
Totally agree... Some I hated 3 years ago are my favorites now...
As a business, I guess it depends on your workflow, customers and volume.
Hard drives are relatively cheap, but shooting up to 200,000 photos per day at some of our larger (youth sporting) events, with customers who's purchase window is about 1 year - the shelf life on 95% of our photos (1-2 million per year) is less than two years - after that we delete master sets that haven't sold.
So 22TB of data drives, with another 22TB of offsite backup data drives, and the servers to house them, does get to be a cost center with the rare possibility of somebody wanting a 5x7 after a few years.
At some point, you have to ask yourself what is it worth to keep old files for an extended period of time. Again, volume and customer expectations.
Otherwise, we rely on our photographers to get rid of 'non-sellable' shots before they leave the camera.
However, when it comes to personal photos, yes, those are kept indefinately!
