I thought that was good?

I started a project in February reprocessing my entire library, re-evalluating image quality, and retiring photos I now see as sub-standard. It ended up taking about four months to go through the entire library.

I recommend the process to anyone trying to improve their photography, although it hasn’t always been fun. As I’ve been going through things and moving backwards, I’ve been deleting out the older images from flickr and uploading the new versions. I ended up with about 1,400 images that I felt were “flickr worthy”, where before my flickr library was around 4,000 images. that implies that about 65% of the library got “retired” — images that at one point I felt were okay, but which weren’t good enough for me to want my name attached to them in public now.

For photographers trying to improve their eye and their technique, I think this is useful as a way to judge how you’re progressing the “man, I thought that was good!” is sometimes a real eye opener. So is seeing which photos are salvageable and which are buckets of bits.

I’m a LOT happier with my image quality these days (but I still have work to do). If nothing else, this exercise has given me some insight on when to not even bother taking shots because they won’t work, and as a side effect, when to get my butt in gear and push for a better angle or better lighting. It’s also caused me to work a lot harder on catching the image properly IN the camera; you really can’t fix bad lighting or bad exposure in photoshop, just minimize the damage.

Beyond the simple “I don’t want that with my name on it” aspect, and the “I’ve learned a lot about image quality and all my images should reflect it” aspect, a third reason I’m doing this is Creative Commons; until January I uploaded my flickr photos under a creative commons license. For various reasons I stopped doing that. Since I wanted to reprocess anyway, by doing so and reuploading, not only can there be no confusion about which version of an image is CC and which isn’t (anyone who acquired an image prior to my license change can continue to use it under that license), but if it ever gets to Big Fight stage over an image, there won’t be any ambiguity over the license AND the image itself will have been redone so that the internal bits can be used to prove which version was downloaded and used. Not that I expect to get there, but it’s a nice bonus. I can prove, technically, that an image was NOT ever covered by CC, even if an earlier version of it was.

And honestly? Given what’s been going on the last year or so in life, being able to just sit at the computer and photoshop stuff was a really nice sanity hook and a way to keep busy without having to really expend too much brainpower or energy, and at times, the photography really kept me moving forward when I was just ready to crawl in a hole…

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