Storing Photos

Alright, so I have picked up Photography over the last 6 months. Kinda curious what people think. I have two questions:

1) I don't have any real time to spend on PP but can easily snap tons of photos in a matter of an hour or two. If I get to it I usually PP about 5-6 photos before that time frame dies for me and I move onto something else. Is my shooting RAW merely just taking up unnecessary space on my HDD?

2) I read somewhere that while learning, junking most of your sub-par to par photos was recomended, what are your guy's ideas on that? I sometimes feel that doing that just means that your getting rid of crappy photos and left with good to GREAT photos.

Any ideas on how the people with Photography as a hobby feel about my questions? Thanks!

1. I have the same problem- I can shoot hundreds of photos and then... I'm suppose to PP them ALL??
Try Adobe Lightroom. You can download a free 30day trial. It's a bit confusing at first (I'm still getting the hang of it) but it's a great way to sort/edit large quanitites of photos quickly. You can copy the settings from on photo and apply it to another, fast and easy. It's the program I use when I shoot in RAW and have lots of pics to go through. If its only a few pics, I like Adobe Bridge.

If I'm shooting something that isn't all that important, I shoot in JPG.

2. My nature is to hoard everything. I have a hard time deleting pictures! For me, if they are out of focus or the lighting is absolutly crap then I delete them. Everything eventually gets backed up to my external HD and eventually to DVD-R. I guess it depends on how much space you are willing to sacrifice too.. lol

Wither or not you keep or delete is really up to you.

I personally keep all my photos, to start with I am a horder by nature, but I also like to find time to look back over them.
Sometimes I find a something that a recently learned PP technique can turn into a good photo, or I might see something I missed last time.
I also take lots of photos just for the memories, simply don't delete them for that reason.

HDD's are very, very cheap at the moment.
You can buy a Terabyte for under US$300, that will hold a lot of RAW files.

If you do decide to delete photos you won't use for anything, I could recommend waiting a day or two and reviewing them again first, you never know what you might spot.

When I come back from a typical pleasure outing where picture taking was done for fun, I have anywhere from maybe a low of 25 pics to a high of 250 or so depending on the event. My first cull of the shots I get rid of all the obvious OOF or mis-exposed shots. This gets rid of a certain percentage of them. I then do a second cull and compare the similar shots and get rid of the worst of the duplicate shots keeping only the top 3 or 4. These then get downloaded to my PC and backed up . When post processing I only look for the ones that I really like. It is not unusual for me to post process and convert to jpeg maybe 1 out of every 10 pics. If it's a family event the conversion rate is higher but not that much more. Eventually I write it all out to DVD keeping just the ones I like on the hard drive.

Bleufire wrote in post #5812216
Is my shooting RAW merely just taking up unnecessary space on my HDD?

Absolutely not! You can to a vast number of things with RAW files, both now and in the future, that cannot be done with JPEGS.

Bleufire wrote in post #5812216
I read somewhere that while learning, junking most of your sub-par to par photos was recomended, what are your guy's ideas on that? I sometimes feel that doing that just means that your getting rid of crappy photos and left with good to GREAT photos.

I never get in a rush to throw away marginal images. Yes, I delete out-of-focus, bad exposures, etc. immediately but other not-so-great images can often be salvaged or repurposed after you have had time to think about them or learn more advanced post-processing techniques. You can always go back and delete images when/if you need the space.

Thanks for the replies! I just sometimes find myself going through a ton of photos thinking "Man, why am I even keeping these?" But I fear that for some odd reason I will miss them. (i think it is cause my photo library has grown and i have a hard time finding the pics i need at a given time.