The Cellar - View Single Post

BigV · 05-19-2008, 09:42 PM

Thank you all for the enlightening discussion. I like the story about the view from a window at close range and the different view from the same window from a greater distance. Interesting and helpful, thank you.

I took over 500 pictures this weekend on a short camping trip. There were some wide shots of the beautiful scenery, a number of extreme close ups in manual macro focus mode, some action shots, some nightime shots, some long exposure shots (the maximum exposure, maximum time the shutter can be open on my camera is 15 seconds. what's that called?)

My current question is about editing. I take a lot of pictures, but I don't discard many of them. I want to have a greater percentage of good pictures. That means taking more better pictures, but also greatly reducing the number of poor pictures I keep.

I recently read of a method, one that reinforced something a photographer friend of mine had told me but I wasn't ready to learn. This method divides the pictures into three groups: delete, maybe and keepers.

The delete group, just delete them right away and empty the trash early and often, reducing the temptation to keep them. "Be brutal", I've been advised. out of focus pictures, ones that are obviously useless. Those are pretty easy for me.

The keepers subset is also pretty easy, I anticipate. I have taken a number of nice shots I'm very happy with. You've all seen some of them.

The maybes.... Right now, they're all maybes with a hasty exit for the obvious deletes and rapid promotion for the keepers. Then I only have to cull the maybes. I just checked my first pass through using this method... I'm not on the wagon yet.

I make a folder for the pictures of a given theme, Scenery, Misc, Family, or a specific event. I make folders like this for each month, in each year. The new twist I'm applying is to make a subfolder of each of these theme/event folders called "keepers". Then I triage from there, deleting and keeping from the maybe folder.

The first pass through looking for deletes yielded 19 deletes, leaving 569 keepers. Next I want to go through looking for, and MOVING the keepers. I want to move them so I don't have to look at them a second time. I want to reduce the number of maybes. I'll make another pass through and report the results.

05-19-2008, 09:42 PM	#26
BigV Goon Squad Leader Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Seattle Posts: 27,063	Thank you all for the enlightening discussion. I like the story about the view from a window at close range and the different view from the same window from a greater distance. Interesting and helpful, thank you. I took over 500 pictures this weekend on a short camping trip. There were some wide shots of the beautiful scenery, a number of extreme close ups in manual macro focus mode, some action shots, some nightime shots, some long exposure shots (the maximum exposure, maximum time the shutter can be open on my camera is 15 seconds. what's that called?) My current question is about editing. I take a lot of pictures, but I don't discard many of them. I want to have a greater percentage of good pictures. That means taking more better pictures, but also greatly reducing the number of poor pictures I keep. I recently read of a method, one that reinforced something a photographer friend of mine had told me but I wasn't ready to learn. This method divides the pictures into three groups: delete, maybe and keepers. The delete group, just delete them right away and empty the trash early and often, reducing the temptation to keep them. "Be brutal", I've been advised. out of focus pictures, ones that are obviously useless. Those are pretty easy for me. The keepers subset is also pretty easy, I anticipate. I have taken a number of nice shots I'm very happy with. You've all seen some of them. The maybes.... Right now, they're all maybes with a hasty exit for the obvious deletes and rapid promotion for the keepers. Then I only have to cull the maybes. I just checked my first pass through using this method... I'm not on the wagon yet. I make a folder for the pictures of a given theme, Scenery, Misc, Family, or a specific event. I make folders like this for each month, in each year. The new twist I'm applying is to make a subfolder of each of these theme/event folders called "keepers". Then I triage from there, deleting and keeping from the maybe folder. The first pass through looking for deletes yielded 19 deletes, leaving 569 keepers. Next I want to go through looking for, and MOVING the keepers. I want to move them so I don't have to look at them a second time. I want to reduce the number of maybes. I'll make another pass through and report the results. __________________ Be Just and Fear Not.