What’s Your Image Plan?

One fo the great sins in my opinion is the acceptance of the true statement that storage is cheap. It is. And like seasoned hoarders, most of us never delete anything. Is that our image plan? How does that value our time? Perhaps you don’t care and if that works for you, cool. But I think it is a question worth asking, either of yourself or with fellow creatives over a coffee or discussion table.

Counting Exposures

I force myself to think of exposures made in terms of rolls of film. It’s easy for me because I come from that space, counting in terms of 36 exposures, or 12 exposures or 10 exposures depending on the camera. The fewer exposures available to me, the more disciplined I became in terms of when the shutter was squeezed. Film, processing, printing and storage all had a cost, and I had to invest the time to review the images that I made. I put a value on my time.

When I got my first digital camera, I got sloppy. I would go to an airshow and stop thinking about getting the best images. I would put the camera in high speed burst mode and after a day come back with over 1,000 images. Just the thought of having to cull those into what I would actually use would give me migraines.

When I photographed sports, 500 - 700 images in a game was not unusual, but I could never really use more than 5 or 6 for publication, maybe a few more for individual players or their families.

I see it today with members of my camera club and colleagues on excellent photography forums. Lots of images being made still despite the presence of AI, but what happens to the majority of them. I asked and got answers.

Nothing.

They sit alone and and abandoned on hard drives and storage arrays and sometimes in drawers of old memory cards (not to worry about those, they’ve probably all corrupted by now anyway).

So what was the point?

Why Do We Keep Stuff We Will Never Use?

Fear of missing out is a popular tool used by advertisers and marketers to get people to do things that in a sane world they would never do. We’ve been sold the line that storage is cheap, but no one ever talks about the value of your time and how much time it takes to cull images.

My Image Plan

Once you have selected your 5 star images what do you do with the rest of them? The vast majority keep them, but also admit that they never look at them again and most have come to accept that after they have passed no one else will either. In fact, most people admit that they never look back at images more than six months old. If the image was not worthwhile then, does its value improve over time, and even if it did, how would you find it? Digital Asset Managers are only useful when they are used well and part of them is only cataloging the pieces that have tangible value. If you have a Lightroom Classic library with a million images, and there are lots of folks who do, how do you find one of them? AI? Keywords? Random chance? Roll a D20? How much time is spent cataloging images that you will never look at or use again?

I’m going to be a bit old fashioned here and propose an Image Plan for your consideration. Whatever you already have, you already have. It’s too late and cannot be fixed. Let it go.

Whenever you go out to shoot, hopefully with intent and plan but even if not, when you come back, download the card to wherever you store your images and then go through them one by one and using some form of rating system tag only the best. According to professionals, that’s commonly about 6% of the total, although amateurs tend to overrate their work in service to not hurting their own feelings or recognizing that an attempt did not work out. If we do not recognize that which failed, we don’t learn anything, but that is a different conversation.

So let’s say you allotted yourself five 20 exposure “rolls” for the day’s shooting activities. That’s one hundred shots and if you followed your own self discipline and observed instead of just seeing, and worked with intent before squeeze, that’s actually a lot of images over the course of a day. Now if I use the percentages that I learned from Joe McNally and Moose Peterson, two mentors for whom I have huge respect, I would expect that there would be between 6 and perhaps 10 images that I would want to take through the full process of editing, and making a print. I don’t use social media and share nothing so for me, the print is the end state. You do you. Let’s say that I had a great day and have 10 5 star keepers. Before starting on any edits but after doing my selection, I would then select the 90 that are not keepers and DELETE them.

I’ll wait until your heart restarts. Yes DELETE them. If I see insufficient value in them today, they aren’t going to be more useful at some point in the future. Now my library only contains my best work and all the cruft isn’t even in consideration. At this point, the catalog for search is simple because the image count is small. I don’t worry about folder renaming or file renaming, both of which I think are massive wastes of time (for me), I just use collections and collection sets (the best part of Lightroom Classic IMO), add useful keywords instead of useless ones that make search results too coarse grained and then and only then move to edit and print. And if the image cannot make it all the way?

DELETE it.

Less is in fact more. Adams didn’t shoot thousands of sheets of film. Eisenstadt got amazing images on a single roll of film. They also never showed anything that wasn’t their best work and didn’t salve their egos by keeping unusable stuff around. I know of some respected photographers who have every negative, positive, sheet and digital image that they have ever made. And when they pass on, as we all do, nothing ends up getting done with them. They become part of the great human waste pile. Their best images live on, most commonly as fine art prints, and no one cares about the others.

Wrapping Up

I understand that this approach will sound like heresy to many. Ok. But if you value your time and your work, you will develop your own Image Plan and live it.

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