Natural Selection. A story of my OCD and deleting.

I had someone ask me what my keep to throw away ratio was while shooting. I told them that it was somewhere around 5-10%. And then they asked me, "Is that good". I responded with, "What does that mean"? I think the definition of good is not something that one person can tell another in respect to how many shots a photographer keeps out of any given shoot. If you keep ten or fifty it does not matter. Neither one makes you good or bad at what you do. We all have our own style.

Typically when I go out on a shoot I will bring a small 1GB card so I can limit myself to the amount of images that can be shot. In my mind I think using a bigger card like say a 8GB allows you to spray and pray too much and that can make you a bit weak overall. When using a 1GB card I will constantly delete images while I am shooting to make more room just by taking a quick glance at them. If they do not strike me right away they get pushed off the cliff to join the rest of the garbage.

Once I get home and upload them to be edited.......now that is where the real OCD starts. I glance over every single image (which will not be over 63 since I use a 1GB card) and if any of them stands out and says "I DON'T APPEAL TO YOU" well, It joins the rest of the garbage too. Of the remaining survivors I will go thru and do a quick edit on all of them to make them pop a bit more. After that I go back to step one.....and to the garbage bin they go. By now I am usually down to about 20-30 shots. This is where the strongest fight to survive. I will go more in depth and start really editing them down and then I can see which ones have the most weakness. Then guess what? GARBAGE!! By the end of all this madness I force myself to delete all but 10-15 even if one of them seems like it looks good. I only want to keep the strongest.

This all might seem a bit crazy to some but it makes sense to me. It is my style. I am sure I have deleted a more than a few good shots that could have sold or that could have been liked by someone else but that is the price I pay. I think we all have our own way of doing most things in life and there is no wrong or right way. In the end, the only thing that matters is you.