Northumberland Camera Club

The needless quest for higher pixel counts, which is more about marketing than improved image quality, means that files sizes have increased.

Consequently, memory cards and hard drives fill up ever more quickly. The hard drive on my computer that I use for storing images is nearly full and I need to install another soon. In the meantime, I decided to free up some space by deleting lots of images so I’ve just been trawling through my catalogue.

Although I shoot to help put bread on the table, I also take photos for the sheer joy of it. My guilty secret is that I take too many.

I’ll spend time composing a landscape shot, checking the histogram and depth of field, picking up any litter in the foreground and then pressing the shutter. Then I’ll do it again, and again, and the next thing I know two hours have past, my litter bag’s full of rubbish, I’m shivering with cold and I haven’t even had breakfast.

I do that on commercial shoots too. I have a contract to supply 50 product images and, because I

enjoyed taking them so much….well you can guess what happened.

Like most photographers, I prefer the photoshoot to processing and developing the images. Being out in the wild and playing with gadgets at the same time for me is bliss.

At the computer, I’ll import the photos onto my hard drive, apply initial development and metadata presets to the batch of raw files and then pick one or two to process. I should delete the rest, but I cannot bring myself to do it, partly because I know I should look at them more carefully and also because grading the images is not very exciting.

I do revisit the photos and reject the duds eventually. Then I am brutal. Like Genghis Khan, I’ll charge through the back-catalogue, condemning swathes of images to digital oblivion.

However, one picture will stop me in my tracks and I’ll get diverted from my photographic massacre. It will be a picture that I had forgotten I had taken. The next half hour will be spent perfecting it.

What do I do with the photos I keep? I’ll print some to keep in an album or hang on the wall. Others will end up on Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. I also have a blog and I’ll upload images to that to accompany my ramblings.

My favourite outlet is an international project I am part of with a few other photographer friends around the world. Once a month, I email a photo off to Julie in Canada and she’ll add them to a website. (If you want to see it, it’s at bit.ly/12m12p)

I love looking at others’ photos too. I never tire of seeing pictures you have taken. I hit the Like button because I really do like them. So, please keep sharing them and keep clicking.