I grew up with Doctor Who. Not the glossy reboot; the original version. I started watching during the era of Jon Pertwee’s third doctor who seemed to spend most of his incarnation fighting aliens in quarries. My teenage years coincided with the reign of Tom Baker, whose early years in the role are still the most memorable (for those of us of a certain age). The latter years of Baker and the rest of that first cohort of Doctors rather passed me by. I was also a regular viewer of the revived Doctor Who until a few years back when it ran out of steam.
The strength of the reboot was that the producers drew heavily on the earlier series’ for plot lines and villains. A bigger budget and better technology meant the rubber suits, the plywood and the cardboard that rendered Sontarans, Zygons, Cybermen and Daleks a little less than scary, could be enhanced materially and digitally, but the bad guys were still recognisably the same bad guys.
Most of my childhood companions leaned towards the Daleks as the ultimate miscreants, but I preferred the Cybermen and it was gratifying to see them turning up regularly in the reboot, having undergone a very effective ‘upgrade’ of their own. I didn't realise at the time but these new Cybermen gave me one of the most useful pieces of photographic advice I received after I belatedly joined the digital photography era around 2005.
Here it is, from Rise of the Cybermen (Series 2 (28) Episode 5):
Cyberman: You are rogue elements.
Doctor: But we surrender!
Cyberman: You are incompatible.
Doctor: But this is a surrender!
Cyberman: YOU WILL BE DELETED.
Doctor: But we’re surrendering — listen to me, we surrender!!!
Cyberman: You are inferior. Man will be reborn as Cyberman, but you will perish under maximum deletion. DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!!
There it is. Rule number three, and sound advice from the Cybermen for all photographers in the era of cheap memory and 20 frames per second: Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete!!
Most of us have far too many photographs clogging up hard drives, cloud drives, tablets, phones or online photography sites. Count them, if you can. Then do some maths. Even with a puny 10,000 images — not many by today’s standards — looking at each one for a mere 15 seconds would take you over 40 hours of continuous viewing. This is before you view all those other images on your Instagram feed, on Facebook, on Flickr or wherever else you graze photographically. Make that 100,000 images and you begin to see the scale of the problem.
There are three negative consequences of this. First, we rarely see most of our images. A quick glance when we first take an image, or when we download it to a hard drive, or upload it to a cloud drive or photo sharing site, might be the one and only time we ever see it. We may not have deleted it electronically, but we have effectively deleted it mentally.
Second, when there are so many images to look at we skim. Even a measly fifteen seconds is longer than many of us are willing to spend on an image. So we scroll through our images streams, often simply glancing at an image as it glides by, stopping only briefly when something catches our eye. No need for photographic subtlety here. Make it big and bright and garish, that’s the way to get noticed.
Third, if we have a vast number of images, barely seen, it becomes increasingly unlikely that we will ever spot the gems hidden in there. Our best images, or even those that are merely good, are buried forever under a digital avalanche, never to be found or seen.
When I lived in Washington DC I often visited the National Zoo early in the morning when the grounds opened before the official visiting time. The star attraction at the zoo was a family of pandas and inevitably lots of photographers turned up on these early mornings before the crowds arrived.
Many of them stayed for an hour or more, cameras set on continuous shooting mode — 4 frames per second, 5 frames per second, 10 frames per second. I can’t imagine how many hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of images each photographer took each time they visited, and I couldn’t begin to understand how they could find the time or concentration to work through that many images to find the highlights.
I suspect some mornings some of these individuals ended up with more photographs of pandas than there are actual pandas in the world. I also suspect most of these images never got more than a quick glance and were soon forgotten, left to gather digital dust. I'm not saying you shouldn't take lots of pictures (though some degree of restraint on your shutter button is not a bad thing) but if you are going to shoot, shoot, shoot you also need to delete, delete, delete.
So, delete, delete, delete. Give yourself the space and time to properly look at, and enjoy, your best photographs. Stop trying to absorb endless streams of other people’s images. Concentrate instead on appreciating a smaller number of higher quality images. This will, in turn, inspire you to make your own photographs better. And, anticipating rule V, once you identify your best images, find ways to put them on display — online, in print, in a book, in a calendar.
Robert Frank’s famous book The Americans contains 83 pictures. I have read that in the course of his travels while shooting for that book he took around 28,000 images. Frank, shooting in the film era, did not have the option to delete but he did have the option to reject. Instead of bombarding the world with 28,000 prints of everything he shot, he edited his images, rejected those that weren’t good enough, printed those few that were and created one of photography’s most iconic publications.
Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Be ruthless.
Great post and I mostly agree with the things you mention. Especially the part on what to show and share. Good example of Robert Frank's work.
For me deleting images does not resonate. Mainly because I do not shoot in continuous mode and I rarely take more photos of the same thing. I only delete photos that are undoubted not correct in any way, but I also have some 'darlings' that are technically not good, but still make me feel good. Even a photobomb ;-)
Something to think about, thanks Olli!
I rarely use the continuous shooting mode on my camera. I hate it to have to go through dozens of 'kinda-almost-exactly-the-same'-photo's to pick out the best one. Then again, I don't often do sports, action or street photography so I don't require it anyway.
I don't really delete images, but I do use a star rating-system to quickly make a selection of photo's I like and the ones I don't feel like editing anytime soon. I go through that selection again to narrow it down even further to the photo's I feel most compelled to. And from there I start (properly) editing them to a finished photo.
Occasionally I browse through the unrated selection and (most of the times) I do find something interesting. Especially if they are photo's from years ago :)
Btw, if I delete images, I properly Exterminate! them ;-)