Are you a saver or a culler?
I am always refining my Photographic workflow. I tend to be a compulsive “organizer” and keep tweaking/changing/updating how I organize/store/process my photos
I’ve found it interesting when reading about other photographer’s workflows that they tend to be divided into 2 main camps - the “Savers” and the “Cullers”
The savers save every single shot they take, no matter how arbitrary/snapshot-y or downright bad, reasoning that even in a bad shot there may be some conceptual or visual element that they might want to a) use for post processing of another photo down the road or b) keep as a reference/texture/etc…
The cullers, on the other hand see it as “why should I keep anything but my best photos? everything else is fluff, and dilutes the overall quality of my body of work”
Personally I see both sides of the argument, but I myself lean more toward the “culler” side - I feel that being stricter in my criteria for judging “keepers” helps me to improve my overall skill level by forcing me to analyze which of my photos really “work” and which (even though I may “like” the shot) are really not up to snuff. I still save a lot of what I consider “bad” photos though - for one reason or another 
Tags: art/creativity
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November 19th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Personally, I never, ever delete a photo - mostly because I have an obseessive compulsive anxiety about deleting *anything*.
Luckily, over the last 10 years, I’ve been able to expand my storage capacity faster than I’ve been able to fill it up.
But I find that with every step of the process I’m culling. I import everything, give it a once over to select the ones I want to work on, take the versions of those I like best and export them, and then out of that pool, select the ones that I want to upload or print or doing whatever I’m doing with them.
It’s pretty rare that I’ll ever go back and look at them again after that, but it happens - sometimes I’ll learn a new Photoshop trick, and realize that there’s a photo in my archives that’s just perfect for it. But that’s pretty rare - mostly it’s just my anal retentiveness that drives me to save everything.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I’m definitely a saver. I used to throw out the raw files for the “bad” stuff, but I’ve had to kick myself more than once for doing that. I find that as my post-processing skills improve and my tastes change, I end up finding usable photos that I once thought were trash. At this point, I’m saving everything. Storage is cheap and organization software works quite well, so I see no reason to get rid of things.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
I guess I should have clarified - I do save shots that I think are “good” but technically flawed - sometimes I like them despite the flaws, and sometimes I re-visit them to “fix” them later one… I am much stricter when it comes to “artistic merit” - not that I lay claim to any level of “great art”, but I at least try and really strip away the shots that I feel are not “improving” me artistically,
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:24 am
I’m definitely a culler. I’m just shooting for my own enjoyment and I tend to shoot static things that are in my area. If it doesn’t work out I can always go back. I do tend to keep more of my shots when it is an event that isn’t repeated often.