less than perfect shots.

ethan

ethan

ethan

Soldato
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What are everybody's thoughts on this? Do you still keep and use them professionally or still enter them for competitions?

For example,I messed what would have been a perfect photo today paying too much attention to the horizon level on the back of a Sony RX100. As a consequence the front of a shop window-frame I photographed is slanted. I am unable to correct it in Photoshop because as soon as I do the actual correction, the writing on the glass inside the frame and above the ledge becomes lob-sided? :(
 
Delete usually, unless it gas sentimental value like a shot of my family.

How often do you look at any of your photos on your computer? Do you really need hundred of Ok photos, let alone failed? The more I photograph the more I am happy to have less photos but if higher quality. Take my recent Wyoming photos, I have about 700 to go through but spent 1 hour picking about 8-10 of the better once, without even looking at the others. I'm busy and don't have time to go through the rest, if I did the 700 would be cut down to about 50, but honestly, just the photos I posted is sufficient.

I'm far more likely to delete photos than ever before, and the more I photograph the more likely I am to delete now. As I have said for many years, I would rather have 1 single amazing photo per year and die with a collection of prize winning photos, than have a hard disk filled with mediocre photos. Sadly the latter is much easier than the former!
 
I'm the same. There's very few I've kept... It's just a waste of disk space. If I think I might go back and have another play I'll keep them, but most of them, eventually, get consigned to the bin.
 
i just cleared over 700gb from my lightroom catalog of throw away shots that for some reason i never deleted in the first place.

My work flow now includes pressing 'x' (reject flag) on any images that i know i'll never need to see or use again. Then it's a simply case of deleting all rejected.
 
My workflow is: Everything sits in Lightroom and what I consider my decent shots go on my flickr, and the better of those decent ones go on my website.

Couldn't even tell you how much worth of data is in Lightroom, but I know I have I have about 4TB of HD space free on my PC. Less than perfect shots probably account for 99.5% of everything I shoot :) I therefore have a LOT.

I'll only bother with deleting if and when I ever run out of space.
 
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^ I used to have that mentality...ie why bother deleting anything with hard drive space so cheap. Trouble is, I use a nikon d810 and the raws are about 40-50megs so it really doesn't make sense having literally tens of thousands of throw away shots taking up space. Hence my new approach of using the reject flag fairly liberally.
 
For me its not even about the HD space necessarily, just convenience for things like searching for key photos, backup.

For me a photo is either a keeper or its not, there is no middle ground.
 
An Exception said:
can you post the imperfect picture?
Click to expand...

Here goes. I can't level the writing on the window without throwing the window ledge out more than what it is. I can't do anything about the reflections off the window either. I'll have to go back and do it again sometime as I am under the sneaky suspicion the dog belongs to the owner of the shop and business:

b7z4fs.jpg
 
looks like you were shooting from an angle and not straight on, I don't think it's that much of an issue but I am sure this could be corrected somewhat in Photoshop.

It would probably involve shrinking the left side and increasing the right, then cropping to make it square again.
 
If you really wanted to keep that, I'd say it was saveable with Photoshop, perspective is very easy to fix, it takes 2 seconds, you'd then either crop or fill in the extra bits.

This is uncropped, 2 second job in photoshop perspective to give you an idea :

warp.jpg


or cropped

warp2.jpg


if you think the dog looks stretched you can just use liquify on a new layer, again a 2 second job.
 
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Good idea Jase. Will do that later. I had forgotten about perspective in Photoshop. Thank you.
 
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