While I was teaching my “How To Organize Your Wildlife Image in Lightroom” session at our Wildlife Photography Conference, I received a few questions regarding whether or not I should keep the images that did not’make it’. .
Prepare to go “Old School”.
I don’t know if my answer makes any sense, other than I’ve done it that way for years.
If I find a picture that is out of focus or the flash did not fire or a picture of my foot while I was walking when I am doing my “cull”, I will delete it.
Then I select “Delete Rejected Pictures” from the Photo menu at the top (as shown in the screenshot above).
Keep everything else.
All of them. Even photos that don’t look good, aren’t selected, or aren’t picked, will never be seen on social media. Why? I am from a film tradition (yes, I am that old) and you would never throw away negatives, no matter how bad they were. You didn’t. Negatives were considered sacred.
Even if it’s not worth keeping, I won’t delete today’s Raw photos. It’s “old-school” to do that, but I have so much storage space, and it is cheap, so I don’t worry about deleting them.
There is still hope, however, as deleting the few out-of focus shots of my feet and other stuff is progress.
FYI: All those old negatives and slides are still in shoe boxes. They’re actually plastic shoebox-sized containers with lids that are sealed, but they’re still shoe boxes. You can say what you like about our parents’ storing photos in shoe boxes, but…it worked.
Even my bad shots are keepers on some level. There’s no school quite like the old one!
I hope you have a wonderful week. Don’t forget to check Rob’s column on Wednesday.