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Well I'm going through my 16000 photos that I've taken over the past year and deleting the ones that have no elements of appeal in them (eg. OOF, no subject matter etc).

I think my D70 has mostly been used to create duds
It's probably a good job to start off with something like the D50/D70 and move up. Or even a point and shoot.

Something I noticed the other day though when shooting is that the viewfinder really sucks to help determine composition. I was looking through it and straining to see what I had in the shot.

However it was that said your first 10000 photos are rubbish was right.

kipper wrote:However it was that said your first 10000 photos are rubbish was right.

It might have been Cartier-Bresson who said something like that, but I think this would translate today into your first 100,000 photos, given that with digital people seem to shoot 10 times as much as they used to with film!

Cheers

Ah yes, that's who it was I know somebody has it as their signature but was trying to remember the name.

digitor wrote:...but I think this would translate today into your first 100,000 photos, given that with digital people seem to shoot 10 times as much as they used to with film!

hrrrmmmm - that would mean I'm stuff taking dud photo's! bugger!

Good luck on going through the old pics - it's a tough process. I guess you now have the benefit of hindsight, and can tell the real 'keepers' from the 'maybe I can fix this'! But it's still a huge job! The good thing is you'll have a good, worthwhile library of pics to work from afterwards. Make sure you catalog them somehow

Sheepie, all my photos are currently in an iMatch DB (thanks Stubbsy). It's funny having a look back. The first week or few days I was using JPEG. Then I noticed that my shots had bad color casts, weren't exposed properly etc, so I switched to RAW+FINE. Didn't really know much about WB and I think was experimenting a lot - lots of blue cast being winter

Hi Darryl

Rokkstar had the signature 'Your first 10,000 photos are your worst' -HCB

I would keep all the duds, as Stubbsy said in post in so many words where would all the great artists be today without the benefit of their initial sketches.

I keep all my duds and treasure them because no matter how far you go you can only learn from your mistakes or outakes, they are as important as the treasured photos you will keep.

Anyway as a conceptual freak I like my duds because they look experimental and innovatiove, I re-composite them into conceptual art, I like producing something out of rubbish, it's part of my conscious effort to re-cycle instead of proliferate.

That's fair enough Wendell but these images have no experimental qualities to them.

Well I've just pruned my photos folder down from 14000 to 7800

Something though that I discovered and it wasn't during my pruning is that I'm pretty sure I lost about 1000-2000 photos from Easter when I was changing operating systems Unless I can find it on a DVD I'm screwed.

Time to get an external hdd I think.

You could always burn some to DVD's

I must admit, I keep a "Trash" folder. Basically it keeps all the duds.

I generally delete anything totally OOF, poor exposure or stupid composition / content. Anything that doesn't quite meet my standards is otherwise sent to the Trash folder.

I will eventually back up that folder to a few DVDs and keep them in storage. The kind of stuff that maybe one day I will look at and salvage, but probably not. If I don't look at it before the DVDs get corrupted then obviously I never will, I reckon.

Kinetic, I have a DVD burner but they're susceptible to scratches and have a limited life expentancy. Especially if they're poorly stored.

Kipper, I feel your pain and live by the words of HCB in my footer.