Looking back (Purging Photos)

With the memory and storage crisis it was definitely time to purge data rather than add to this set of SSDs to store more photos.

With the recent increase in cost of pretty much all data storage I decided it was finally time to purge my photo collections of redundant photos. I had a good number of 4TB SSDs for both the main storage and for a direct backup of all of my photos along with a number of spinning disks for a 2nd offsite backup. It took a number of weeks to cull my photos down to those that I really “need” and in doing so I spent a lot of time going through old trips. Some of these old photos I haven’t looked at in years.

What I did realize was there were a lot of photos that I might want to reprocess and add back into my portfolio. Some of these photos I had worked on before but forgot, others I look at with a different eye now. I can see some that were difficult to process 15 or 20 years ago but were really interesting compositions and with the latest tools in Lightroom and at least some better skill at processing photos it is much easier now to produce an interesting final shot. For this exercise I concentrated on a trip we did to Maui in 2011. At the time I was shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II which was a great camera and as it turns out the photos hold up quite well with a bit of processing.

What have I learned from this exercise?

From the rim of the Haleakalā crater on Maui, such a rugged barren landscape. One of many photos I had largely forgotten about before looking back and reprocessing now. Back then this shot would have been difficult to process without many of the new masking capabilities in Lightroom.

1. Sharpness and Focus
   I definitely need to purge my photos when I first process them. In the past I tended to keep way to many shots for no good reason. Luckily, storage at the time was relatively inexpensive. While purging I realized that I had kept photos that were not sharp enough to use even when there were multiple similar shots that were sharp and in focus.

   As a nature photographer I also tend to shoot in burst mode, not so much ‘spray and pray’ but I do tend to shoot in small bursts of 2-3 shots and now with electronic shutter and high burst rates of the latest cameras that number increases to 3-5 shot bursts very often. This is great when you are processing your shots to get the best head position or the eyes open, but because I didn’t tend to purge the photos that I didn’t like before, I had a tonne of shots that I will never use that also make it more difficult now to enjoy looking at my photo collections.

   While doing this purge I did find some cases where I have changed my mind about which photo in a sequence I actually like but most of the time I probably should have purged more than half of those shots on my first pass when processing them years ago. Since doing the purge I have been more vigilant about doing a couple of passes on the photos when I first process them making sure to get rid of most of the duplicates, blurry or out of focus shots and many of the shots that are just not as interesting as I had hoped when I hit the shutter button.

   I have found a number of benefits to this exercise. It is now much more fun to look through the photos of any given shoot since I’m no longer wading through many of the same shots but rather looking at a quick history of that time. I have also found a good number of shots that I never processed before or ones that I feel I could reprocess and make significantly better. Looking at these photos also has helped to understand what I was doing well in the past, what I have learned and changed and what things I might still need to rethink or change in my technique. I can see how I looked at a scene back then, if I think I got what I wanted out of it and sometimes I look at them thinking that I might have forgotten a technique that I should use more now.

2. Post Processing Technique
   In reasonably good light many of my old photos have held up well. My processing techniques from back then maybe not so much. I have definitely refined how I process photos and my preference in the last couple of years has leaned more to subtle processing where in the past I leaned towards more contrast. Detail has always been a priority for me and I have found that shots from cameras like the Canon 5D II hold up fairly well but when I look back at shots taken with cameras like the original Rebel many of the landscapes are still ok for sharing online but I’m really unlikely to print many of them. They do hold up well when it comes to thinking about photo albums, much like the film days where we might keep albums under the coffee table to relive times many of these photos would work well in a small booklet. This is likely going to be an exercise for a later date.

   New photo processing and noise reduction software has also given new life to many older photos that I would never have processed when I originally shot them. This is a real bonus as there were shots that at the time I liked the composition but could not recover the details as well as I wanted back then…now the algorithms have improved to a point that I can actually add a few photos to my portfolio that I skipped over back then.

3. Inspiration
   I really love looking back at trips. We have been able to travel to some really amazing locations and this makes me want to travel more. I look back at some trips thinking that I really want to go back and see it again. Most of the time I want to go back and see the parts of a country that I didn’t see the last time. Costa Rica is an exception. I would really love to go to the same (or similar) locations and get some of the wildlife that I missed or get better shots of animals and locations.

4. Backups
   Backups are crucial! I have had failures in my picture storage a number of times. I was using spinning disks for my photos for years (both the main and backups) and have had multiple disk failures where I would have been completely screwed if I didn’t have backups. While purging my photos I found a number of shots in which the file was corrupted. Data degrades over time on physical storage, some forms are better than others. Luckily I did have backups of those photos. I now use two 4 TB SSDs for my photos (purged down from 5) and have duplicates on separated 4 TB SSDs along with a copy of all of that data on a NAS on spinning disks. Hopefully this will be sufficient but it is worth checking out your backups once in a while to ensure they are still good.

5. Reflections
   I was surprised by how many good photos I have. As I started looking back I had a feeling that I was going to look at those shots and think that they were crap. I feel like I have learned a lot over the last 25 years doing nature photography but I’m still pretty happy with what I took back then and I think much of the improvements now are technical (more keepers due to great autofocus, better low light capabilities, etc) although I hope I have improved on my compositions and in seeing the potential for a photo. I have definitely been able to get better compositions in flight now that I have cameras that can track with more than just the center autofocus point :) and don’t have to crop those shots back to get the composition I want.

6. Memories

   I have so many great memories that are triggered when looking back at these photos…many places and people that I would have forgotten completely over time. Just like having a photo album on the coffee table looking back at these photos brings me back to those locations and times. “Remember when we were here” has been the start of great conversations and the hope for more of the same in the future.

I am writing this post after processing just the photos from our trip 15 years ago to Maui, many of these photos I have now put up on my website portfolio and I think there were some really lovely shots. Now I really need to go through some of the other trips. Our Australia trip, for example, was amazing but when we came home I realized that I had a significant amount of dust on my sensor and I never processed a good number of shots that I liked because it was so difficult back then to fix the shots. Now this is nearly a one click process in Lightroom (it isn’t perfect but nearly so) which may allow me to use a good number of shots that I would never think to use.

So should I reconsider purging shots that I think are bad now because the technology to do things like dust removal and noise processing will only improve? This doesn’t stop me from getting rid of duplicates, poor compositions, partial animals in frame and out of focus or blurry shots….I don’t want to have AI make up the data that could have been in the photo but I do like that the latest algorithms can at least make what I shot look like what it was supposed to look like.

I am also aware that Lightroom and a number of other programs have now built in the ability to purge your photos which may have made this process easier but using software like that would have automated the process to the point that I wouldn’t likely have looked closely at any of the photos and certainly wouldn’t have relived much of these trips. I also don’t quite trust the AI techniques to determine which photos I would prefer to keep, although they would probably do a good job of determining which photos are similar to other good photos already out there. I will have to try some of those tools to see if they allow me to more efficiently remove out of focus or blurry shots but with the latest cameras and lenses I don’t have nearly so many of those. I just don’t think it would find the same “good” one out of a set of in flight photos that I would consider the most interesting most of the time.

Here are some of the reprocessed shots of the Maui trip. you can also find them in the Maui gallery here.