Digital Home Thoughts: Sometimes Deleting Can Be Good: The Concept of Culling in Digital Photography

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Monday, February 13, 2006

Sometimes Deleting Can Be Good: The Concept of Culling in Digital Photography

Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:00 AM

The Concept in Practice

When I'm out shooting with my DSLR, I'll typically snap a minimum of two or three images of almost everything. I'll vary the angle slightly with each photo, zoom in less/more, maybe fiddle with a setting here and there, but all the photos will be very similar. When I return to my PC to dump the images to the hard drive, that's when the process begins. I view my JPEG images (I haven't made the jump to RAW yet, that's another story) using ACDSEE because it allows me to view in full screen, without any toolbars or distractions, and because it's blisteringly fast at rendering large images.

The first pass I make is to delete the obviously bad photos. These are the photos where, the second you see them, you know they need to be deleted. Photos that are significantly out of focus, too dark to salvage with software exposure adjustments, and images that are just plain badly shot.

For the second pass, I'll go through and start looking at the images that are redundant. This is where culling comes into effect. Which is the best photo out of those four I took of the same subject? Which photo best represents the memory of what I saw? I delete any photos that don't represent the best of the set.

My third, and usually final pass, is the comparison of all photos in the set. This means I compare photos of the same type shot at different times. This is also the pass where I'll decide which images need to be adjusted, and which will benefit the most from it. So, on a recent vacation, I shot around 20 photos of the beach at different times, on different days, and from different angles. Do I really need 20 photos of the same beach to remind of me of what it looked like 30 years from now? No, I do not. I set about comparing all the images, and got the number down to around five images that represented different parts of the beach, showing different things (sand, waves, the sun setting, etc.).

Tell Great Stories with Your Photos

I believe that photos tell a story, and in the same way that a good story doesn't repeat the same thing over and over, having near-duplicates of the same image is equally useless. I like to cull my images until I feel the story is as tight and powerful as possible. Great stories have impact, and so should your photos.

On a recent trip to Mexico I shot around 1200 images in total, but by the time I had my final cut of images, I was down to 290. That's still a lot of photos for a one-week vacation, but I feel it tells the story of our vacation in a manner that shares the depth of our experience without making for a boring story. Would I show someone 290 photos of my vacation? Not at all. When I've shown photos to our friends and family, I do a "highlights" version and pull 40-60 images. The images that best represent the experiences we had are the ones that get shown. Coming up with a highlights reel is much simpler when you have a strong set of images to start from.

Here's an experiment: go back to some of your earliest digital photos, and browse through them. How is the story that your images tell you? Is there a lot of repetition, or does it flow from one memory to the next? Sometimes culling is made easier years after the fact - I know I've gone back on older photo shoots and hindsight allows for a much clearer vision of which memories are important and which are just taking up space. Give it a try.

Do you cull your images? Or are you a digital pack rat? I'm very interested in hearing opinions from other digital photographers on this subject, so if you have an opinion, share it!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his wonderful son, and his sometimes obedient dog. He continues to cull his photos.

Do you enjoy using new hardware, software and accessories, then sharing your experience with others? Then join us on the Thoughts Media Review Team! We're looking for individuals who find it fun to test new gear and give their honest opinions about the experience. It's a volunteer role with some great perks. Interested? Then click here for more information.


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