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Wednesday 25 June 2014

The Importance of Each Photo

Over the past few days I have spent a lot of time editing hundreds of pictures (taken over the past 7 months) that were sitting on my laptop or locked into my camera.  As I have gone through them, I noticed how I'm finally at a point where I feel comfortable deleting a lot of the photos; I am still learning to be completely ruthless but I'm definitely getting there.

In the past photos were only taken of special occasions, and while I love taking pictures of life, I think the importance of a physical memory that our descendants can look at, is easily forgotten. I am grateful to live in a time where photo-taking is as simple as a press of a button (though, it has to be remembered, can also be deleted at a press of a button as I discovered during my trip to Paris at school) and I wish there were more photos of me when I was younger.

I love taking photos, and I love having a lot of photos documenting my life (though unfortunately, being behind the camera means I'm not actually in many).  However, I feel that with digital cameras it's now so easy to take photos and that's it, most of them will sit on a camera, phone or computer until they are lost. It has become so easy that we forget how important a photo can be.  It is easy to acquire thousands of photos that will never see the light of day - either because they aren't any good, or simply because there are many that capture the same moment, a few seconds apart.  It is this latter category I have difficulty with deleting, but I figure that I'm only going to want one version of that moment to be printed out for my albums.

So I'm learning to give the important photos the respect they deserve by deleting the rest. With so many pictures, it is easy for the great ones to be lost among the many; it is with this thought that I will continue editing and deleting my photos, ensuring to have no photos I'm not one hundred percent happy with (okay, ninety-eight percent as a hundred percent is probably a little too much to be asking of someone who knows nothing about photography).

Do you keep all the photos you take? Do you get them printed out?

1 comment:

Faye Savory said...

I have the same problem with deleting photos Tamara! I went to look through those on my camera not long ago, realised there were thousands on there, a lot of which weren't that great so put it down and didn't bother going back to it. I am definitely going to have to start being a stricter like you so that the good ones mean a little more!

Faye | freckles-and-all.com