Keep Your Best, Discard The Rest
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I’d love to claim credit for this phrase, but that would be a lie. I was reminded of it when it was used in a recent post at Petapixel, although I think I first learned it in my teens when I had a photo published in the Community newspaper. I was told bluntly by an old editor, who was probably younger than I am now, that the key to success in getting work published or even respected was to never share anything but your best. He even advocated not keeping anything but your best in your own archive.
At the time, I was, for cost reasons, shooting almost entirely in black and white, because I could handle the processing myself, making it cheaper than sending film out through the drugstore. There were great pro labs that I could not afford, and even large camera store chains or labs that serviced a variety of retailers, but again, expense was an issue.
Being impressionable, I went home with my cheque, which was for $10, and starting looking around. Binders of negatives that I would never look at again, binders of contact sheets that I would rarely if ever even look at, and piles of prints, either 4x5 or 8x10 (because you could set up the school paper cutter in the darkroom and get four small prints out of a sheet of 8x10 paper). Even at my level at the time of being barely discerning, I realized that I was keeping a lot of junk around and I started to build the habit of throwing stuff that was not my best away.
I did keep in a separate binder the results of experiments and learning exercises, many with notes scribbled on the back in my teenage scrawl reminding me of what I had been doing. Those images still add value, because I don’t need to keep making the same mistake over and over, as I have the documentation on what worked and what did not work.
Then I got a heavily used Nikon F2 AS with motor winder. I could burn through a roll of 36 in about 9 seconds, if the battery would keep up. It helped me capture more decisive moments in my burgeoning sports work, all involving high school teams, along with some really execrable attempts at dance photography. It also meant that I had a lot more to throw away.
This was hard. I had paid for bulk rolls of film. I loaded it into the film canisters myself. I processed every roll and made contact sheets, then marked up the ones to print with a grease pencil and printed those as 8x10s. The motor drive made a marginal difference in keeper count in action work and decreases the keeper count in still work because I became overexcited by the sound of the motor drive.
When digital happened and I switched (not at first, I admit), I discovered that my problem was only getting bigger. There were no caps on the number of shots that I could take, only the memory card capacity and I could always (or when I could afford it) buy another memory card. Did moving to digital give me more keepers? Not at all. Because the images “cost” less, I shot more of them, but ten shots of a bird produced no more keepers than two shots of the bird. Plus early digital was nowhere near film in quality of image (certainly not the digital cameras that I could afford). There was no Lightroom or other catalog systems at the time, so I made my own on expensive hard drives and while the files were small, when your hard drive is only 20 megabytes, you had to be frugal with your space. I laugh now that not one of the images from my getting older Canon 5Ds would have fit on that 20mb hard drive.
Over the years, storage space has gotten less expensive, and my keeper ratio has improved, mostly because I squeeze the shutter much more deliberately now than I did in the past. When I got my Canon 1D Mark III (still have it, it’s a marvellous camera), I fell back into shooting too many bursts, but relearned that if I wanted to be professional, it just meant more images to cull and to discard.
Today I talk to people with over a million images in their Lightroom catalog, some with multiple millions. I will ask how often those old images get used or even looked at and the answer is commonly “not in a long time” Few people say never, although we both know that to be the truth. I know that storage is cheaper than ever and accept that, but I have to wonder why keep anything but your best to this day.
If it’s not your best, and not a learning exercise, why keep it at all. You probably will never use it. Yes it costs next to nothing to keep, but when and if you do have to go back, you have to wade through all this dreck. When COVID hit, I pretty much stopped shooting. As I return to it, I have become even more attentive to shutter squeezes. I treat each shoot as if I am shooting expensive film. When I take my 4x5 camera into the field, I might make four to six exposures in a span of three hours. My culling process is quick with about 50% worth further editing in my opinion.
On my last big airshow, I came home with about 1000 images. I used Photo Mechanic for the culling because it was much faster than Lightroom at the time. I ended up choosing to keep about 60 images that I would then review to determine which ones deserved post processing. So 1000 became 60. It took much longer to cull than it did to shoot and the cost was in my time that was not spent doing something more interesting. Of the roughly sixty, I ended up editing twelve and choosing to print seven. 7 of 1000 is really quite a disappointing number. Less time on the shutter, more time on intent is what I am working on.
Now however, when I look at my collection from that Airshow, every one is one of my best aircraft images. None of the statics made the grade, although I shot lots. Every one that printed has story, gesture and my intent comes through and I can look at them with joy. I never see any of the others, they went to the trash can, however cheap storage is, and the viewing today serves to remind me what I can do when I focus on the job.
Discarding everything that is not top notch works for me. I still have too large a catalog as my discipline had slipped for many years and it contains images that I will never use or even want to look at. Even the thought of doing the culling makes my head hurt. Had I done it at the time, I would be far better served today.
I’m not telling you what to do. I am sharing my own experience having done photography seriously for over 45 years. Maybe it makes sense to you, maybe not. That’s up to you.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
