Hi all, this is more of a workflow question relating to the amount of images resulting from a shoot.
As an example, for my standard family portrait shoots, I present about 30-40 images to the client on CD... obviously, I pick the best 30-40 of the lot. The ones that remain are either on par with the ones chosen, or ok but not great. All duds and flawed shots get deleted.
My question is... what do you do with the shots that are ok but not great? Do you delete them? I sort of want to hold onto them in case I need them but if they aren't presented to the client and if they aren't the best of the lot, what would I need them for?
Interested to hear your thoughts, and other opinions and tips you have relating to this.
After the session, I do a first edit, and end up with say, 75 out of 200. I burn those 75 to disc, even though in the end they will only say maybe 40, similar to you. The others that don't make the first cut, I put those on a discard hard drive, and they will sit on there for a while, just in case. I end up emptying that discard harddrive when it fills up, so they sit there for at least a few months.
Just recently I was in a situation where this was important.
I shoot a lot of airplane events, airshows and "meet-n-greets". Last year I shot a gathering of a particular homebuilt airplane; in January (8 months later), I was contacted by a magazine wanting one or two of the images from the gathering, plus they were looking for specific types of shots and wondered if I had any? I did, because I only discard failures, and got them a few more shots that they wanted.
I do differently for other types of events. I shoot horse-events, for instance, and have never had a situation where someone wanted anything other than what I picked for them... so I routinely delete them.
For my personal photos, I do a quick once-over when I first add them to my Lightroom catalog; then a few months down the road, I go over them again, and always end up eliminating a few more.
I do this only because of the amount of photos I have, not the space. Disk space is cheap, but my time going through thousands of photos isn't so cheap, at least not to me. :-)
