The real challenge in photography

The real challenge in photography

Ok this is one aspect of a challenge, there are many.

The real challenge is this (among many others). Keep only the keepers of all artistic photos you took, and delete all the others. The best situation would be if I only produce keepers, unfortunately this is not the case. To explain a bit:

Artistic or not artistic shots ?

There are many shots which I keep for different reasons, for information, like something on a picture, do not want to forget something, have a special plan with the photo and for many other reasons. I don’t talk about that photos.

But there are many so called artistic shots which is only for fun or winning competitions or selling for huge sums let’s be positive, :-).

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Keeper rate

I usually take many photos, and less than 5% a keeper. As Ansel Adams said “12 remarquable photograph a year is a good crop”. Perhaps you work differently, and only take smaller number of photos. For example on my last trip I took 240 photographs, out of which I really like around 5. It is only 2%. (I am not talking wow ! photographs which is even less) Sometimes this proportion is higher sometimes less.

For action shots I never know which one will be a keeper. If I photograph a bird I don’t know in the beginning how close I can get, so take many photos usually. Many of them similar, which is not my goal to have many similar photos.

It is a brave thing to absolutely get rid of every artistic photo which is not a keeper. Honestly I am not there yet (but started to get rid of many photographs, and started to delete from the camera before I download them if I do not like). But there are many photographs which is always a pain to browse, store, resize, etc. Out of which many are not a keeper. It would be nice to browse only keepers.

What do you think ?