A guest post from the brilliant Kevin Littleton at kevinlittleton.blogspot.com
Keeping Memories
Don’t delete photos too quickly. I don’t delete anything when I’m taking pictures somewhere because looking at them on that tiny lcd screen doesn’t give you a clear view of what it really looks like. When you get home and upload those pictures to your computer you get the real look. You can’t really tell what a picture looks like from your camera. Some of my best shots were later “discovered” after going through them on my computer. Then there is Photoshop where you can take those “awful” shots and touch them up to make them look “better”. Remember though, when in doubt make them black and white and then they instantly become art!
To take this practice further I don’t delete a single photo. Ever.
The reason behind not deleting any pictures is because each picture is a memory and each memory is something beautiful that needs to be remembered. So what if the picture isn’t artistically sound, it’s your picture and it’s your memory.
Not all my pictures are in focus or of anything particularly exciting but I do keep them all. I don’t want to throw away memories. It’s the same thing as writing in a journal. Let’s say you had a bad day and you write about it in your journal or diary. Just because it was a bad day would you crumple up that piece of paper out of your journal or delete that entry from the computer? I hope you don’t because you can use that bad day later to grow and learn from. Each memory in our head is equally important. We need them.
Please leave a comment for Kevin below.
March 11th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I’d add a cautionary note about deleting things even after you’ve uploaded them. While clearing old stuff from the card I once accidentally deleted all the pictures (about fifty of them) that I had just that morning taken of the House on the Rock Museum.
Fortunately a friend pointed me in the direction of some recovery software that let me get them back but it was a very worrying couple of weeks before I’d completed the process and a lesson I won’t forget in a hurry.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
This is a terrible thing that I do too. I will shoot and shoot and shoot. But then my hard drive simply fills and fills and fills. True, there are some external drives that have come down in price – but they have never really been all that reliable, unfortunately. And I could just get another internal drive and change a cable here, a cable there – but I am feeling lazy.
I do make sure to bring all my pictures back with me, and I copy them before I shop them too to keep the original (what will be the lesser) intact.
This is fine now, as I shoot 5mp images – but when I get my new 10mp camera? I can just feel the space sinking away.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
@Bob Hale – That’s good news. I have accidentally deleted whole albums before and I know the feeling.
@previously.bitten – The good news is that external hard prices are always going down. The bad news is that everything these days is using bigger and bigger file sizes… You can try backing up all your photos on cds or dvds.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hey, I tagged you for a Proximade Award on my blog! http://stephinfectionisinyourhead.blogspot.com/2009/03/proximade-award_12.html