Most photographers I know shoot a lot, then delete a lot. They purge through the captures from each outing and save just the best for future editing. Many see this culling as an important part of the process. A decluttering of sorts.
My process, to be clear, is a fucking mess. I take a lot of photos, especially on my iPhone. Some of these are entire trips consisting of world class destinations, some are just daily adventures, some are simply fleeting logistical items (like a shot of where we parked in the vast parking lot), some are a quick “here’s what I’m doing right now” shot for social media. I have 130,665 photos synced on my iCloud account, and I have a fair number of Photos libraries that are not included in that total.
I also have an unending number of shots from standalone cameras. From the “tough” camera we use for snorkeling adventures, where sheer quantity is a reasonable strategy over trying to get a “perfect shot” while sloshing around in the ocean waves. And since acquiring a fancy-ass full frame mirrorless camera, I find myself taking a crazy number of shots during our trips. I’m still learning, well, just about everything, so more practice seems better. I’m very much a dude with a camera, not a photographer.
That said, I’ve always planned on purging all of these photos. I simply hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Part of that is because storage is so incredibly cheap these days. Oh, and also because I’m lazy, and I’ve just been busy with other priorities. And it’s simply not clear that the juice is worth the squeeze, especially in the era of smart folders and AI-enhanced photo search.
A few years ago, I developed a near-daily practice of looking back through the photos I took “on this day” in previous years. So I scroll through nearly all of my photos over the course of the year.
In doing so, I’ve come to realize how much I really enjoy seeing the “bad” shots I would have deleted at the time. But seeing those same pics now? Man, they add SO MUCH additional context and flavor to the other shots.
Put another way, my best shots—the ones I’d actually favorite, edit, and post—are much better when I can also see the broader context of the throwaways. They’re richer. More personally meaningful. They tell a different story, to me, than the “good” shot does alone. My photo collection is better for their inclusion. My memories are deeper, more lifelike.
This has been extremely apparent in the photos of my recently-deceased dad. For instance, here’s a short three-shot sequence of shots preceding the one I was trying to capture. This isn’t the best example I have, but it’s one I saw this morning because I happened to take these on this day three years ago.
If you would have shown me just the last photo, which is the one I should have kept while deleting the others, then I couldn’t have told you much about that moment besides the basics: we were at happy hour, he was seated in his wheelchair, he had ordered a Budweiser in place of his usual PBR, and so forth. Some clues, certainly.
But with the other three “should-have-been-deleted” shots? Oh, I can see his personality shine through. 100%. It’s an entirely difference experience.
The first “bad” shot shows his slow turning-of-the-head routine, a joke of sorts he had with me. A prelude as he wondered what the hell his son was up to, and what joke was coming his way.
The next shot captured the exact moment he saw my outstretched phone, before his face had a chance to respond. It looks a bit blank, but that’s just an artifact of a momentary capture—like a weird look on someone’s face when you pause a movie on an awkward frame. But it’s a look that I know and have fond feelings for. I know that look. It’s the look I loved seeing just as turned into an oncoming prank. You can see a hint of a smirk on my face when I see it on the screen.
And then the head turned back again, a bit embarrassed, chuckling to himself because he now knows what’s happening. He knows he’ll have to pose for yet another photo—but at an unusual angle—to (graciously) appease me.
In seeing these other photos, I now remember that I did this specifically because I had just remarked that all of our photos always had the same background when we sat in those particular bar seats, and had never captured the bartenders in the background. A detail I might not have remembered without the setup of the other shots.
Ok, final shot—again, the only one I probably would have saved. If I was purging photos.
But so much context would have been lost without the others. How many smiles would I have missed out on every time I looked at all of these? That last photo might have been the leading record of the outing, and it certainly is way better than nothing. I’ll certainly look at that one photo far more often than the others—it’s the one that’s favorited and the one that’s in the “Dad at Cold Beers” album, after all. It’s the one that will get posted online.
But there’s still value in keeping those other photos, even if they aren’t good.
Of course, this concept doesn’t hold for all use-cases. Do I need to keep track of the damaged bits of a rental car I took photos of before driving away? Initially, yes, but clearly not anymore. Do I need the photo of the side table I considered buying but bought something else instead? Unlikely. Do I need the photo of the interpretive sign at the trailhead? Well…maybe? Yeah, actually, I do find myself looking back at those. Do I need the outtakes of that group trip we took to Sequoia? Oh hell yes, I do. Do I want the series of bad shots I took with friends at their wedding after-after party? Yes, of course, absolutely. Why the hell would I ever dispose of those? They’re almost all the same shot, with often a series of minor differences. But, collectively, those add all the extra dimension you might want in the future.
My point here is that drafts can be meaningful, even if they’re not worthy of sharing or highlighting. They can be a version of personal journaling, perhaps meaningless to most others, but with which you can quickly capture (and preserve!) complex nuances you’d lose if you only kept the edited final publication, or even if you distilled it into writing.
When there were meaningful financial and logistical limitations to saving all your photos, it made a lot more sense to be critical of any photo’s flaws and discard it. These days? I’m not so sure.
PS
By the way, the same outing to Cold Beers yielded several other photos that others might have deleted. Here are two additional photos of my dad getting out his wallet to pay. Now, we had long since removed his credit and bank cards, so he had nothing of value to offer. The whole thing became a treasured joke. Was this the first occasion of that joke? I’m not sure, but I so glad that I not only captured this moment, but KEPT IT.
