I've been a pro photographer for 15 years, but it was all portrait work. I had a good sense for the good the bad and the ugly. I was forced to retire due to 4 back surgeries. Luckily I live very close to a major NS Junction in Reading PA, so I try to shoot alot of them and also old coal mines. My question is how much do you self edit, in oder to not clog your hard drive with useless pics. Do you keep only the wows. The ones that may be sellable, or do you hang onto more just in case. I'm shooting Digital with a Fuji S2, reviewing in ACDSEE and then do any PS work in PSCS. Thanks for any guidance. Dave
Given how easy and cheep it is burn CD, DVD, etc. so that you can save all the origianls offline why not keep them. I'm not saying hang on to the grap shots but something I have found while building the my DHVM website is some of those So-So shots were the only surviving photos of some pieces of history and I'm glad they were saved. I would not keep them just on your hard drive as it will fail someday and you will loose your photos forever. That is why it's best to keep multiple copies of those photos you truely care about and keep them from being damaged together.
I agree with Darren. You never know what you might have in your collection that you thought was worthless, only to have some historic or tragic event associated with your subject. Suddenly, no matter how clear or perfect or imperfect your photo is, it becomes a part of the new interest in that subject. Heck, there were people throwing out photos of first generation diesels that are now in demand for "nostalgic" magazine articles. Save them to some media, DVD, CD, the new plug in devices that can save tons of memory.
It's nice to find another serious shooter, Dave! I've always been of the school that if you hang on to your sub-par material you'll never advance as a photographer. That being said, I still throw out about half of what I shoot. Something has to be very rare for me to hang on to even a mediocre shot of it. I figure so much of railroading today is already well-documented there is no need for my lower end photos to be saved from a historical standpoint. It's top-shelf only for me!
Well.....depends on your goals. I run two very large photo roster sites with hundreds of contributors. In many cases, even with all the pics I get, mediocre shots are the only pic available of a certain loco. I gladly post these. Later if I get a better shot that shows no new info, I will replace the poor shot with the good one. I find that when my sites are used for modeling or reference, even a poor picture is better than none. They can answer very simple questions as to paint scheme, horn placement, ditch lights or not, etc. etc. "A picture is worth a thousand words." I'd keep em and file em somewhere cause they can be of use. On top of that, they can also spark nice memories later on. [ February 14, 2006, 10:03 PM: Message edited by: John Barnhill ]
Yes, I too have so many missing photos from the D&H roster that people just didn't take or tossed that I wish I had a poor photo of. Now that people know that I will post those pictures they are slowing coming out of the shoebox in the basement. With so many people now going digital it will be harder to get those off shots as they will just hit the DELETE key and poof they are gone forever.
I'll go a bit further and sure wish I had the negatives and prints that I had in my darkroom before I went to college. They somehow, like the electric trains, disappeared. Some of them were priceless, especially with friends passing away now and photos I had of them as kids that their families would appreciate.
Unless it's a picture of my thumb or my foot, I save them all. Storage is cheap these days and you never know when you need some pic for refrence. For $200 you can get a 300GB+ hard drive. Then there's DVD to archive.
I prune pretty hard. If the shot doesn't catch me in some way, I dump it. I back up everything to DVD. I've got a terabyte of disk storage, so I can keep a lot of stuff on hard disk, in duplicate. But I still dump stuff regularly because it just gets in the way.
