“In photography, you’ve got to be quick, quick, quick, quick. Like an animal with a prey.” Henri Cartier-Bresson
This why I often shoot in burst mode, with several snapshots taken in quick succession.
Let me elaborate a little. As you know, I have been a long-time shutterbug. Over the years, despite my best efforts to hold back, I have accumulated over 25,000 pictures.
Google (my landlord) is suddenly saying “Hey dude, you are occupying a lot of space… you will now have to pay us $9.99 per month to continue storing your junk.”
Ten bucks are not much, but it adds to all the little expenses that I incur every month to keep my blog going…
So, I decided to cull my flock… a tough decision.
All my pictures are my babies, and it is difficult to discard any of them. When it is time to choose, I agonize over each picture weighing the pros and the cons of my decision.
When I look at a snapshot, I ask myself:
Is this picture properly focused? To be a keeper, it must be.
Does it show emotion? It will get an extra point for a frown or a smile…
Is it an action shot? Difficult to discard.
Do I personally know this person? Does he/she look reasonably good on this shot? I won’t keep a picture of anybody caught in an embarrassing posture.
How many similar pictures do I have? Since I usually shoot by bursts, there could be six or seven shots of the same subject.
Once you delete a picture, it is gone forever. It becomes a piece of junk silently orbiting in space. But invariably, the minute you delete a picture, you want it back. It is like ditching a girlfriend.
Go, I never want to see you again!
Ten minutes later you are in the street crying your eyes out.
Breaking up (and deleting pictures) is hard to do.
But after steeling myself I managed to remove close to 1000 pictures from my folders. No small accomplishment my friends. My computer is now telling me that I went down from over 25,000 to 23,961 photographs.
I will (for the time being) stop harassing my captives, but if my storage space become overcrowded, I will have to restart (with the blessing of the Administration) my raids again. Sorry.
Don’t worry, I have plenty of pictures of each of you.
Alain