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On deleting photos and why I never do it

I never ever delete photos. Well, that’s not entirely true. I almost never delete a photo when in the field, and NEVER delete a photo once it’s made it onto my computer. The only photos I will delete from my camera while shooting are the “Oops, I pressed the shutter button with the lens cap still on” type. Everything else, even if maybe it doesn’t look at that exciting then, I keep and evaluate later. The difference between how a 5616 × 3744 RAW looks on a rinky dink 3″ VGA resolution screen and how it looks on my color calibrated 1920 x 1200 24″ monitor at home is often night and day. On the tiny screen you can get a rough impression of what’s going on in the photo, but there is no nuance. I really only ever use it for checking exposure. You can’t check focus on the damned thing, so why even try? There have been so many times that I’ve taken a photo, thought it to be a total discard, only to look at it later and realize that it’s much better than I’d thought. Good I didn’t do the hasty thing and delete the photo I was iffy about in the field.

Of course, shooting RAW and never deleting anything means I have a tremendous need for storage capacity. Fortunately for all of us, I have 3 8gb compact flash cards I use which have proven to be vastly more capacious than I require over the course of a day, often longer. Whenever the 5DIII comes out, I’ll need to upgrade my cards, no doubt, but by then 64gb cards will be cheap and easily accessible, like 1gb cards were when I got my 20D in 2004. Ah the inevitable march of technology. It makes me want to buy a 35mm camera, a film scanner, and just go analog. One day when I have more reliable income again, I will do that. Not as a replacement, but as an addition to my current setup.

I don’t know why anyone out there other than my dad would care about this, but I was thinking about it after reading something on the internet and thought I’d share. I’m always interested to learn about how people work since it often provides insight into the work itself. And if not, it’s fun to talk shop.

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