Then along came digital. Image after image, a healthy portion of them crap but hey... 'I might be able to make something out of that someday!'. Many 'somedays' later I've finally gotten to the point where enough is enough. Something has to be done to cull this ever growing weed of images. I hadn't realized there were so many. A few tucked on a hard drive here, folders on the desktop, a few on my laptop, there another external hard drive... It seems harmless until you add it up. Then suddenly I realized I am one step removed from those 'Collectors' you see in the news. Granted, digital images can't fall over and kill your cat like multiple floor to ceiling stacks of magazines, newspapers and phonebooks but the sheer volume is the same.
My mission: Reduce a library of over 100,000 digital images to 10,000 (or less!).
My Tools: Aperture 3.0, 2ea 2TB Caviar Green hard drives, my trusty Mac, lots of coffee and a good friend.
I'm going to start with my most recent work and cull mercilessly while my friend Enrique starts with my oldest work and we meet somewhere in the middle. I'm not sure which of us has the harder job. I shoot far fewer frames now than I did in 2005 but the quality has improved dramatically. So while I will agonize over which slightly different head turn makes the bear look perfect, Enrique will be wondering what the heck I was thinking when I took 275 poorly composed shots of a mallard duck.
The lesson: Edit Early. Edit mercilessly. Edit often. Have great friends to sucker into helping you!
-- Post From My iPhone
8 comments:
Good Luck with that, Rebecca. I feel your pain / need. :)
Can you send Enrique over here? I think I need a trusty photo editor as well.
Thanks Gary!
And Juanma, you can have him after he's done with my library. ;^)
It's good to see you have started working on this, about time too ;-)
Wow, that's quite a mission! No doubt you will discover a few overlooked gems you are glad you didn't delete. :-)
I'm finding all kinds of stuff! Very glad I'm taking the time to do this. I've reached February 2010 and it's actually getting easier as I go.
Would love to hear what progress you made, Rebecca... I too tell meself "...I'll get to purging baddies - later..." Ugh.
Hi Greg - so far, so good! I've managed to get caught up on editing from 2005-2010. The trouble with photography is the more I get done, the more images I manage to add! I'm not sure I'll ever be caught up on key wording but at least everything is registered for copyright and it is so much easier to find images for submission!
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