Saving Out of Focus Shots

Does anyone else do this? Sometimes, I'll get a cool shot that is badly out of focus. But the photograph is compelling and I want to do something with it. I usually don't like using the artistic filters in PS, but I find that if you use them with OOF shot, you can come up with something that looks good, and you can't really tell it was OOF.

Here's an example of what I mean. When I took this shot I was actually focusing on the top of the cathedral, and using a shallow DOF as I wanted to capture it with just the top part of the cathedral in focus. I had no idea though that this girl was going to turn, look directly into my camera and smile. Had I been able to anticipate that I would have shot with everything in focus in that moment. But since I've got her doing that, and the older couple taking photos of the cathedral, it just seemed like a cool scene. But it was terribly OOF, so I cropped it and then I ran it through one of those artistic filters in PS. I forget which one this is, I just played around with them until I got one that I liked the look of and ran with it. This is an old edit, before I really knew what I was doing in PS, so I could perhaps improve it, but you get the idea...

Enjoying the Dom

Does nothing for me. Unless I purposely shoot something out of focus like crowds moving during a longer exposure...it gets deleted on first pass. I have too many good shots that need my attention, don't have time to play around with stuff that belongs in the delete bin.

...simply delete, not worth saving! the filter added made it even more unappealing, only my opinion and not a personal attack. chances of you catching another woman looking into your camera is extremely high, recreate the shot in another crowded environment unless you have a personal connection with the woman subject and this photo.

enjoy

ONE30 wrote in post #17921057
...simply delete, not worth saving! the filter added made it even more unappealing, only my opinion and not a personal attack. chances of you catching another woman looking into your camera is extremely high, recreate the shot in another crowded environment unless you have a personal connection with the woman subject and this photo.

enjoy

True, but I'm never going to be there again. At least not anytime soon. It's a moment in time that my buddy and I shared in Cologne. Oh and no personal offense taken, ever. C&C is always welcome and appreciated, I understand it's nothing personal.

I do save pretty much everything - except the accidental shots of my shoes
After all - storage is pretty cheap.

I keep thinking that I'll try and do some extra processing to save those that are slightly out of focus.
But I never get to it.

Maybe next year I'll have time ......

WaltA wrote in post #17921111
I do save pretty much everything - except the accidental shots of my shoes
After all - storage is pretty cheap.

I keep thinking that I'll try and do some extra processing to save those that are slightly out of focus.
But I never get to it.

Maybe next year I'll have time ......

Yeah, I pretty much never delete anything. I have a good system for organizing data on my hard drives, I use a double bay hard drive dock, and have hard drives for everything, multiple backups of documents, music, movies, pictures I've collected, my photography. My photos get stored in such a way that the originals never get touched, and are organized by camera & date, with a note about the subject.

When something like this happens, I find it fun to create an image out of it. Enjoying the Dom was something that my best friend and I did back when he was studying abroad and I flew out for a beer tour of Europe. That'll never happen again. And while I certainly can go out in the city where I live now and create a much better, in focus shot, that moment is gone.

WaltA wrote in post #17921111
I do save pretty much everything - except the accidental shots of my shoes
After all - storage is pretty cheap.

I keep thinking that I'll try and do some extra processing to save those that are slightly out of focus.
But I never get to it.

Maybe next year I'll have time ......

I find the problem with saving everything is that you can get overwhelmed with all the photos and you always need to wade through the mud to get to the good ones. Now you can rate everything but then you are just wasting time rating the poor images.

One of the most important things I learned is to do an honest purge right away and get rid of the garbage before it pollutes your repository.

heldGaze wrote in post #17921160
Yeah, I pretty much never delete anything. I have a good system for organizing data on my hard drives, I use a double bay hard drive dock, and have hard drives for everything, multiple backups of documents, music, movies, pictures I've collected, my photography. My photos get stored in such a way that the originals never get touched, and are organized by camera & date, with a note about the subject.

When something like this happens, I find it fun to create an image out of it. Enjoying the Dom was something that my best friend and I did back when he was studying abroad and I flew out for a beer tour of Europe. That'll never happen again. And while I certainly can go out in the city where I live now and create a much better, in focus shot, that moment is gone.

Well if you want to save it for sentimental reasons that's fine, but don't ruin it by applying some weird action to it. How can a morphed image bring back those memories?

Exactly.

I've got a few out of focus shots that are a memory of a place and time that will never happen again.

On my first trip to San Francisco with my wife, we were at a restaurant in Fisherman's Wharf and I gave my P&S to the waiter to take our picture. Its horribly out of focus. But its a moment in time that is captured by this OOF picture. But it works.

I understand why some who take pictures for a living can't be bothered with this kind of shot. But only 10% of my photos go into "product" that we market. The rest is about documenting our travels and experiences.

So really, for the question you ask in this thread, its not fair to compare hobbyists to working photographers.
We have different philosophies. Different reasons for taking pictures.

Edit: this got posted out of sequence. Its a reply to the OP - not to Hogloff.

That's an interesting idea.

I keep all of my RAW files. You've inspired me to try to make something out of the ones that didn't make the cut for post processing.

Hogloff wrote in post #17921175
Well if you want to save it for sentimental reasons that's fine, but don't ruin it by applying some weird action to it. How can a morphed image bring back those memories?

I mean, that image definitely reminds me of hopping from one brewpub to the next with my buddy, crossing the square right in front of the Dom and shooting some photos around the Christmas market. It can bring back the memories the same way a painting would bring back those memories. And, to me, it's more aesthetically pleasing than a fuzzy photograph.

Hogloff wrote in post #17921170
I find the problem with saving everything is that you can get overwhelmed with all the photos and you always need to wade through the mud to get to the good ones. Now you can rate everything but then you are just wasting time rating the poor images.

One of the most important things I learned is to do an honest purge right away and get rid of the garbage before it pollutes your repository.

WARNING: Off-Topic Post... this is about data storage rather than out of focus image processing

The good ones get copied out. When I want to go back and edit the good ones, they are in a separate area. So I've got a dump of everything, and essentially I do an inverse of your delete. I just copy the good stuff out to a working area, and the rest just gets left behind in the area where all the shots are saved. I'm not joking when I say I've got a complex and well defined method for managing my data. I've even drawn up flowcharts for how my data moves in the past. Right now for example, when I take a photo with my phone, it automatically gets uploaded to the cloud, which automatically sync's with my computer at my desk. That computer has all its data mirrored over the local network to another hard drive. So in the span of less than a minute, my smartphone photos are stored in 4 locations. Now, I have limited storage in the cloud service I use for that. So I sporadically delete those images to stay under my quota. However, I also use another cloud storage solution in which I have unlimited storage for photos. At least once a month, but often more frequently, I upload all my photographs to that service. My computer's internal hard drive doesn't have enough space to hold my photography, so I have an external drive which is my working drive for all my data (docs, music, photos, etc.). And at least once a month that drive gets backed up to another drive which is usually disconnected from the computer (it's not a safe backup if it remains connected to your computer). This is just a small snapshot of how data moves around my systems. It's a wild combination of mirrors, local backups, online backups, offsite backups (I drop a hard drive off at my parents' house when I visit and take the old one home to reuse it, and have hard drives scattered around the country at friend's houses). Last time I did a mockup of the data flow in my system it took 7 or 8 visio diagrams or so. This isn't for everybody of course, but it works for me. Once I wrote a 4 page document on the theory of organizing digital music files, for fun, but also to share with friends and so they understood how my music collection works.

PS - If anyone was wondering, the unlimited cloud storage solution for photos that I use is Amazon Prime. If you're a Prime member, you get free unlimited storage space for photos - this includes RAW & PSD files as well as the obvious JPEG & TIFF. Their software isn't great, I wouldn't use it as a photo sharing service, although you can certainly share photos using it. But I only use it as an online offsite total backup of all my image files. Make sure you understand your internet data usage limits. In order to avoid busting my quota I had to split the initial upload over a few months. Now, when I upload, it checks and sees the files that are already there and skips them.

heldGaze wrote in post #17921258
I mean, that image definitely reminds me of hopping from one brewpub to the next with my buddy, crossing the square right in front of the Dom and shooting some photos around the Christmas market. It can bring back the memories the same way a painting would bring back those memories. And, to me, it's more aesthetically pleasing than a fuzzy photograph.

To each their own I guess. You originally asked if people run their fuzzy photos through some PS filters...and my answer is definately not. Firstly...the vast majority of my fuzzy images get deleted. I get enough sharp photos that bring back memories. Now if there was a special fuzzy photo...I definitely would not morph the image into something it was not. I'd keep it fuzzy as that is how the original memory evolved...why change it?

You asked others what they do...I've given you my view. Basically I have no time for fuzzy images...I have too many sharp photos to pull from.

Yeah, it's a really bad idea to keep OOF shots. Unless you're Jay Maisel, or a photographer who has this crazy idea that a less-than-perfect photo may sometimes be okay.

Go for it!

http://studio.jaymaise​l.com/products/marilyn​-monroe

Like Walt I have some OOF shots that I can't bring myself to delete because they bring back memories. Some are just OOF, some are accidental very long exposures which can be more interesting visually.