I’m 62 now and my wife and I are starting on a mission of down-sizing. Way back in the day, when I was in my late teens and throughout my twenties I used to think of myself as a pretty good photographer (I actually wasn’t).
So now I’m going through all of my old slides and prints and I’m absolutely astonished at how much I’m getting rid of; I’m probably tossing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 90 to 95 per cent, or more, of them. And, since a lot of them are second-rate shots of architectural features in various locations, the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that nowadays I could just find the same stuff on Google images.
I fancied myself a photographer when I got my Canon AE1 back in '78 or so. I took photos that were nothing more than snapshots, thinking a fancy camera made them more than what they were.
But I did get serious about it over the last 10-15 years, and I now pretty much know what I’m doing, and what makes a worthwhile image. I am proud of much of my recent work and a little embarrassed about the early stuff.
I had a Minolta SLR and a variety of lenses and filters and such and, even though I did produce some good work that could have been submitted to a magazine or photo-contest, it was far, far outweighed by my photographic detritus, sadly. For me too, that started in around '79 and petered out somewhere in the '90s.
And next I have to go through my dad’s (Rubbermaid Roughneck) bin full o’slide trays starting from back in the '50s. 'Zounds.
Oh, I would hate to throw away photos, but It may be necessary. These days photos are digital, and even then I almost never delete a bad photo, too much work, and hard drive space is cheap. I will get a lot of photos from my parents some day, I would want to digitize them, of course assuming I could retrieve them decades from now.
Eh, I think you’re being too hard on yourself. I’m pretty sure I heard somewhere that even for the great photogs, only a few percent of all the shots even they take are really good ones. And so what if many of your images are similar to what you could find on Google images? Those google image pics aren’t yours.
I had two periods where I got into photography- one was in college when I took a photography 101 class- my dad had a decent SLR I borrowed, and I bought myself a tripod to experiment with long exposures. I went to college at Wayne State University in downtown Detroit, and one night I snuck to the roof of a tall building and got some cool long-exposure shots of lit-up Woodward Avenue. I got a friend to drive me around Detroit taking pics of everything through the passenger window. Once I took a pic of a rundown strip joint called “BURLESK” with one of the letters burned out. A guy happened to walk out just as I took the shot, thought I was taking his pic, and jumped in his car and chased us for awhile (think my friend stopped driving me around after that). I got some shots I thought were super arty and profound, but were actually visual cliches, like a shot of the Renaissance Center framed in the open window of an abandoned, partially collapsed house.
Then in my 40s I got the first generation Canon Digital Rebel- a very nice prosumer SLR. Digital was a real transformation for us amateur photographers, since you can take a million shots and not worry about burning expensive film. I had a lot of fun with that Rebel- I got into wildlife photography and among my maybe 99% of duds I got some real keepers, like a crystal clear shot of a great blue heron in flight, or an osprey fishing- one shot of him making a wake in the water with his claws, another with him flying up out of the water. Sadly, he didn’t come up with a fish ot that would’ve been a real keeper.
Anyway, I guess my point is I’m sorry you consider that it was a spectacular waste of time and money. Did you have fun while doing it? Then it was not a waste. I was probably no better an amateur than you, and I don’t regret it a bit.
I absolutely had fun doing it - often a blast - so you’re right, it wasn’t a waste. My current state of mind is more of bogglement. It sounds like you did some very nice work btw.
Yeah, though like I said, among many, many, many bad exposures, not properly focused, badly composed, or just plain boring shots. I’m sure you have some really nice keepers too.
I identify with much of what OP is saying. Does anybody else think that just as old photos go through color shifts, they also become less focused (maybe the dyes spread a little or something)? I look back at stuff that seemed sharp back in the day but now it seems not to be so. Black and white was more bulletproof but I shot a lot more color.
We took the youngish (10, 13) grandsons to do some sightseeing and had the idea to let each of them use one of my cameras. They were sooo much more attentive to things, looking for a good, interesting shot, trying to notice something the other hadn’t. I have come to realize that I’m like that…photography is how I train myself to slow down and see what’s there. I have a “harness” and off one shoulder I have a camera with wide zoom and off the other I have a camera with tele zoom, so I can find things to shoot.
And quite often, since Mrs. L and I have traveled a fair amount, we consult old photos. The digital part is awesome. I still use Picasa so I can search it, find when we took the trip or what we saw, and all the memories come back. Isn’t it awesome? Back in the day, did you write when you took the photo or just throw it in a shoebox etc.? Now, EXIF takes care of that. Occasionally we will completely forget a place we visited or we visited there twice or whatever, but thanks to digital photos we can usually sort it out.
At the end of life all we have left are the memories. Photos help with that.
ETA: I always go back to that quote from “Raiders” where the French archaeologist says that if you bury a watch in the sand for a thousand years it becomes priceless. You take a photo today and everybody remembers. Ten years from now when someone in the photo passes away and people want to remember them, it becomes much more important.
My wife has fancied herself as a photographer for years. She has had some pictures accepted at photo exhibitions and won a couple ribbons. We were cleaning out some stuff a few years ago and we came to the big white elephant, 7 Rubbermaid containers full of photo albums and loose pictures. She was brutal when it came to getting rid of stuff. All the photo albums went. She went through all the pictures and got rid of all that contained people not in her life anymore except for a few close relatives. 2 of the containers were 8x10’s and 11x14’s. She wanted them thrown away, I gave them all to Goodwill. I don’t know how many they sold, there is still a big box of those pictures available at that Goodwill, they are down to 19 cents each now. We were left with one container and it is not full. In reality, when her time comes, I seriously doubt any of her relatives will want any of the pictures. She offered a bunch to whoever wanted them while clearing out the containers and had no takers.
I know I’ve always been a mediocre to lousy photographer, but for years, I held on to pictures I took on class trips back in the 60s - mostly black and white, because color film and developing was much more expensive. Then one day, I sat down with my big box o’pictures and realized I had no idea who the people were or exactly what the buildings, etc, were. In no time at all, I’d gotten rid of hundreds of them.
Somewhere in the basement, I’ve got a bunch of photos I took in Paris in 1983. I don’t think I’ve looked at them since I picked them up after they were developed. For all I know, they may be all stuck together in one big photographic blob. I’m curious enough now that I may go look for them…
Now, I have thousands of digital photos in dozens of folders, some of which are backed up. Guess how many or how often I look at them. Go ahead - guess!
I have my father’s slide collection, going back to the '30s, in addition to my own thousands of slides. And I just inherited cartons and cartons of my brother’s slides. l don’t have time to go through them, so sadly they’ll wind up in the trash. And even if I found some rare gems among them, what would I do with them?
Yes, this. I’ve done photography for many years and one thing you need to learn to do is be brutal. Save only the best of the best, which means for pretty much everyone they will be tossing most of what they’ve taken. The real point is to have fun. If you’re not, then either you are doing it wrong, or it’s just not your jam.
Even thirty, forty fifty years ago, every souvenir shop sold these plastic sleeves of professional quality slides of tourist sites (like this). So I had the same question; why do I bother to take the same photo that’s available for sale and also taken by every other tourist to come to this site?
Back in February my nephew migrated at least temporarily to Taiwan. He sold off virtually every asset, including his condo in Sacramento and – what’s relevant here – gave his desktop to his father, my brother.
It was better than my brother’s so he, my brother, was going to use it and in turn, give his desktop to me, which is better than the one I have now. He’s a photographer so he’s been going through his files deciding what to save and what to keep.
That was nine months ago and I’m still waiting for him to finish. If it weren’t for the Great Graphic Card Shortage I’d have given up and bought my own by now.
These days I say the trick to being a good photographer is to know how to cull.
Nobody will ever look at 5000 photos taken from the same vacation.
But, if you have to force yourself to whittle that set of 5000 down to 36 photos to make a printed photo album, then they are going to be stunning shots, and people will happily page through a thin album with fifteen or twenty pages.
This process is sometimes tedious, but when all the deadwood is gone, you can see the truly great photographs that you took. What a joy that is!
Nowadays I use a tool called Photo Mechanic that was designed specifically for high speed culling of thousands of raw images–it was designed for professional sports photographers to cull, keyword, and upload to the wire services all during half time.
Not that I really need all that power, but it’s pretty nice to be able to be able to sift through 300 photos from an event in a matter of minutes before importing 20 of them into Lightroom.
Of course, Lightroom has culling features, but they are ten times slower than Photo Mechanic–speed is its claim to fame.
Tossing 90-95% of your overall take is absolutely normal in professional photography. I do weddings and events, and I toss about 75-80%, but other work, I’m literally looking for two or three pictures in a hundred. (And, of those event photos, the ones that I might keep were I editing for myself and not a client, would involve tossing 95-98% of the images.) That doesn’t mean the others necessarily suck – it’s just that you’re sketching around your subject. National Geographic photographers would take around a thousand rolls of film or more for an assignment that ends up with a dozen photos in the magazine.
We’ve got boxes and boxes of photos from when the kids were young. We really need to get them sorted through and scanned - but a photo scanner is not in the budget, and our regular scanner would take a large part of forever.
I’m sure we spent well over a thousand bucks over the years on photo developing. We still have our Nikon camera that we bought back in 1984 - I’m honestly not sure what to do with it.
