Comments on: Are you a saver or a culler?

By: laanba

laanba — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:24:52 +0000

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.

By: Ed Z

Ed Z — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 04:24:04 +0000

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,

By: Brian Auer

Brian Auer — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:32:21 +0000

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.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:31:58 +0000

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.