What’s with the title?
If you have never heard this saying, it originates from writers who have the tough decision to kill off their much loved characters. Today this saying is being applied to film, and I am going to apply it to my beloved photographs.
Balmer Farm - a little experiment with foreground interest
The Brighton Peace Statue - The Bokeh Project
Why do you have to kill them off?
Sometimes you have to make a decision to sacrifice some hard earned art, for the sake of the bigger picture. To make this relevant to photography, it would be like having five variations of the same subject on your website, because you can’t choose between them. This waters down the value of the photographs and is therefore harmful to your portfolio.
Seven Sisters Cliffs at Sunset - summer 23’
Removing emotional attachment
I have said this before, but the benefit of having too much editing to do is that I often have weeks, sometimes months between capturing something with my camera and getting around to editing and sharing the photos. This allows me to remove, or reduce anyway, the emotional attachment I have with my work. Taking a step back, if I woke up at 3:30am to shoot a sunrise that was a long tiring journey away from home, then when I got home I would feel how much energy and time I put into capturing those pixels on my memory card. I am therefore a lot more likely to want to keep all of them.
If you back up the photos and return to them another day, then you will feel very differently about the images and hopefully more objective about whether they are any good or not!
Newhaven Harbour during storm
Light rays punching through the canopy in heathland
Balmer Farm on an incredibly misty morning
Top 1%
According to my Lightroom catalogue I capture around 15,000 photos a year. This is a lot. I have a filing systems that includes the original raw files, I then make a ‘selects’ folder which filters down the images that I will consider editing. This is typically around 10% on a good day. I then edit the images and sit on them for a while before sharing them. If you follow me on social media then you are seeing the top 1-2% of my images, all of the others didn't make the cut.
What’s your point?
My point is that if you visit, for example, the Taj Mahal then I will show you the top 1-2% of the images that I captured. Revisit the images a year later and the 98% of the other images all of a sudden look great. This is simply because you are over the decision fatigue of editing your photos of the Taj Mahal and you are looking at them with a fresh set of eyes so to speak. And no, I have yet to visit the Taj Mahal. My point is therefore in the heat of the moment to have to make some tough decisions, but on reflection, the images that you dismissed might also be really good and worthy of sharing. To add to this, I don’t delete photographs. I worked out that it costs 0.002p per image to store them on a hard drive, at which point I thought, what is the point in deleting the images. I sometimes revisit old photographs, that I dismissed at the time, and I am very glad I kept the original raw files.
Osea beach huts
Birling Gap sunrise
Corfe Castle - this image didn’t make the final edit because if the lens flare. It adds but also distracts….
Brighton Pavilion with ice skating rink
What is old to you is not old to others….
The problem I need to get over, which you may struggle with also, is if you have a backlog of images and edit them way after you captured them, they already feel old to you. But the fact is, your audience has never seen them. To your followers these images are new and fresh and as far as they are concerned, relevant content. Obviously you need to take into consideration topical subjects, but as I said in my video staying relevant, everyone gets tired of topical content quite quickly and welcomes an out of season photograph when it pops up on your feed.
Shoreham sea defence - long exposure
Shot from a car window returning home from a shoot at Balmer Farm
Ashcombe windmill with the lit up rolling hills leading in
What is their destiny?
If I make a video about a location, I will include images of that place that I may consider to be average, because it is topical. The images in my videos are not my portfolio, I consider my best work to be on my website. I set myself the goal of making a video once every two weeks on YouTube and it is not possible to capture 26 portfolio standard images every year. I don’t think I would be doing the audience any justice if I only create one image in each video either, so I share the top 10% broadly speaking.
Towner Gallery - Eastbourne
Ashcombe windmill sunrise in the middle of winter
Beachy Head Lighthouse - close range
Beachy Head lighthouse with ripples in the foreground - an image I have been wanting to capture for years now
South Downs - mist and rain (yes I got wet that morning!)
Lone deer at Petworth House Park
With time comes more meaning
I believe that photographs have more meaning the older they get. This is very true with portraits. If I photograph my children, they are on my camera and they have very little meaning other than the fact that I may have captured a moment. Most of the time I could recreate a similar image the following weekend. Fast forward a year and your child has lost another tooth, their hair is different and they can now ride a bike. The photos from a year ago all of a sudden feel like a distant memory and feel extremely sentimental.
Applying this logic to landscape photography is a little more difficult, as they do not change as frequently. However there is a local woodland that I captured this year with a wild garlic crop and it looks as though the woodland will be felled by this time next year. In turn, making my photographs more meaningful and impossible to recreate due to time passing. My point, capture landscapes and iconic locations even if they are cliche, as you never know when they might evolve.
Brighton Palace Pier pre-sunrise long exposure
Foreground interest with the rippled sand at Brighton - low tide
Wild Garlic - local woodland
The remaining 8%
So what happens to the 8% of images that you edited but didn’t make it not your video and you didn’t share on social media? That’s the question. They are homeless. I genuinely don’t know what to do with them. They have value, I worked hard to create them, but I am creating new images all the time that I am more excited about. So I thought I would create this short written piece to share some of the 8% from the last 12 months that would otherwise be lost in time.
Edburton Hill - South Downs National Park
A little different to my usual style, I have made the man-made intervention the focal point of the landscape
Let me know?
What do you do with your ‘left over’ images? I would love to know. Thanks for reading, I appreciate it.
