After returning from New York City last week, I took on the daunting task of reviewing about eight years worth of raw files. (Anyone who has tried probably just exclaimed, “yikes!,” or something much less polite… :-)
I’m _very_ conservative when it comes to deleting raw files, figuring that it is better to end up keeping files I don’t need than to find out that I trashed something that could have been useful. In addition, as I do an annual review of the previous year’s raw files every winter, I invariably discover a few good photographs that I had somehow passed over or failed to notice at the time I made them.
As non-fun as the process of reviewing tens of thousands of files can be, there are some worthwhile results, including:
- I do delete a fair number of just plain useless files that have been cluttering up my hard drive. I figure that if it wasn’t interesting a the time I took it, wasn’t interesting during my annual raw file review, and still isn’t interesting a few years later… it may be time to get rid of it.
- I find some (to me, anyway) real treasures that I had overlooked to misunderstood or simply forgotten at the time. At some point I’ll write more about why this happens, but it is not unusual to fail to understand how a photograph works right after making it. But when viewed with some temporal distance, some photographs turn out to surprise me by how successful they might be. So one of the pleasures of this otherwise daunting task is the discovery of such images.
- I relive experiences related to the making the photographs. When I view my own photographs, the visual imagery is always associated with non-visual experiences that were part of the process of making the photo. When I “rediscover” some of these older image – even some that turn out not to be photographically worthy of sharing – I also rediscover those experiences that I had forgotten and all sorts of memories return. (Among those in this batch are many of my family – especially fun during the week when our youngest son moved off to a different city of get his first job.)
- I learn things about my own photographic growth that might not be apparent when only considering the most current work. For example, I’m often struck by how certain themes and ways of seeing that I’ve come to recognize more recently were already present in work done quite a while ago. Understanding this is important, I think, to developing self-awareness as a photographer.
Dan, great post! The re-living part is a surprisingly powerful one for me – and very enjoyable.
Scott
Dan, a fifth reason. Photoshop, and what we read, change rapidly. You know about the first, which allows more to be done with a photo (better or in different processes) or one’s ideas about photography change (I recently became far more interested in B&W and, with all of Scott Kelby’s comments in the CS4 book, have
rediscovered quite a few new ways to view photos and have gained a new understanding about what B&W can show you in contrast to just a color photo.
Karl
Karl, great point! It turns out that I’m also about a month into (finally) upgrading to Photoshop CS5 and finding that certain new features are quite useful with the older images. One that is pretty remarkable (in ACR) is the profile-based lens correction feature. All lenses have some optical issues including barrel/pincushion distortion (and worse), corner light fall-off, some amount of CA, and so forth. This feature is largely doing a very good job of automatically dealing with issues that I had learned to handle with several manual, labor intensive steps in the past.
On top of that, I continue to learn more in the technical sense and learn more about how to use the technical knowledge in the aesthetic sense. This means that when I go back to certain older images I see that I did not handle them it ways that I now know would be better, and it also means that a few images that were beyond my post-processing abilities a half dozen years ago now seem quite usable.
Dan