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THE BIGGEST MISTAKE
WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Hey, I just shot 200 digital photos of musicians jamming last night at a local bar; do you want to see them all? No, of course you don't. 200 unculled, unselected shots is too many.
Well how about 100, after I get a chance to go through them and throw out the bad ones? The answer, for me, would still be no.
Well, how about I take a few days, go through them carefully and pick out 6-7 best photographs? Would you like to see them then? My answer now would be yes.

The biggest mistake with digital is to show too many photos without carefully culling the very best. And this lack of critical judgement is hurting photography.

NOTE: In the film days, 'editing' meant selecting your best photos from all you shot. Now editing means processing the photo with software as in the term 'photo editor'. The current term for what used to be called editing is culling -- so I will use that term in this article -- but when Walker Evans says 'editing' in his quote, he means 'culling'.

Photography has always been a percentage art; in the past photographers talked about the ratio of film shot to pictures shown, such as 10 to 1. Yet today with digital, I am seeing many more photos with very little selection of the best work. Under this avalanche of pictures, the really good important shots are getting buried.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless.
Walker Evans (famous photographer best known for his work in the 1930s)

Think that there aren't that many photos out there? From 1994 to 2010 five billion photos (that's B) have been uploaded to Flickr.com according to Wikipedia. Today on Flickr over four million a day or close to two billion a year are being uploaded and that's just one photo sharing site. The Yahoo Directory of Photo Album Sites lists over eighty other such sites and that does not include social networking sites such as Facebook.

Now, admittedly most of these shots are personal and not seen by the general public, yet consider the number of photos in a Flickr group. The Flickr self portrait group, which is available to the public and that I recommended in my article about self portraits has almost 450k photos. If you were to look at every self portrait for just 3 seconds, it would take you over 23 16-hour days (we'll let you sleep for 8 hours) to look at them all. Now lets say you wanted to spend a whopping 10 seconds looking at only the best ones, lets say 1 in 10 -- it would still take you about 8 full 16-hour days to see these best ones. And, obviously, no one is going to devote all their waking hours for 8 days to do this.

There are serious consequences to this mountain of digital photographs: Very little time is being spent looking at each photo as most are only viewed for a few seconds. As a result the very best photography is being missed. This is not good for the art of photography. The very best photos should be viewed for many minutes at a time -- as it often takes that long to catch the subtle aspects of good work.

Whose Fault Is This?

Is this the fault of photographers or the technology? My answer is both, but mainly it is the way that this technology is being used.

First: Digital is so easy and cheap it produces a lot more photographs than film. In addition they can be blown up quite large with no wait time -- unlike film that required a long lag time before blowups were processed plus an additional cost. So a direct result of the technology is that there are a ton of pictures.

I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.
Walker Evans (famous photographer best known for his work in the 1930s)

Second: Having said that, I believe it is the duty of each photographer to carefully look at their work and select only the best for display. This is a skill -- no doubt about that. And this is perhaps the one aspect of digital photographer that will take more time and work than film photography. But mastering this skill has many benefits. Photographers will learn to understand their visual strengths and weaknesses and thus be able to recognize and work on both. In fact one of the best ways to learn and grow as a photographer, is to understand your own best work and then to build on it.

As a photographer who shoots primarily candid photographs, my rule of thumb is that I should spend at least twice as long culling photos as I did shooting them.

A Simple Method For Culling

A simple method for culling or selecting is as follows. Go quickly through everything you just took and mark any shot that strikes you. This simple process often eliminates two thirds of your shots. Next look at just those striking shots next to each other. When you look at good shots next to good shots, it becomes much easier to recognize the best imagery. Now go back to this second batch and select only the best of the best. In this process use whatever software you are comfortable with. You can copy these photos to a new folder, tag them or rate them -- depending on your software. I personally prefer to save my culled photos in a separate folder.

I think that a ratio of 30 pictures shot to 1 shown in not unreasonable for digital photography and with beginning photographers that ratio should be even higher. And obviously this is only a rough rule of thumb -- as some days you will get fantastic pictures shot after shot.

Lets say you took 200 shots. The first culling step will reduce the shots you are looking at to about 60. Then second step will knock down the number of shots to about 20. Next get some sleep. Don't look at them for a day or so. And when you review them days later, the very best will often jump out -- perhaps just 6 or 7. And these are what you should show others.

I also believe that groups, such as the Flickr groups, should restrict the number of photos that can be uploaded from an individual. I would suggest that no more than three be allowed per week.

Read What Other Photographers Have Said:

Read this detailed article about culling. I personally do not recommend deleting, as this author does, since you may discover things days or months later that you did not see initially. I do however, recommend that you copy your best work over to its own folder so that your selected work is clearly separated from all the 'raw' unculled photos you shot.

Or read this discussion where a long time photographer wrote, "We can now shoot 500 pics where we used to shoot 72 at the most." And another wrote, "people just page through the Smugmug gallery without really looking."

And this discussion on dpreview.

NOTE:See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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