Philosophy Culling and Curating

[agentlossing]

I was just going through my Flickr account, culling somewhat mercilessly (for me... most viewers would probably survey the results and still find about half of it that could be culled out), as I periodically do. My Flickr usually remains around 500 photos, sometimes more, sometimes less. Flickr provides me with a long-term place to scrutinize my photos and the unconscious phases or trends I tend to fall into. I actually appreciate it for that more than for any "eyes" it brings in to see my work. Generally when I have photos up for a good while I can start to see whether I in fact like them or not. Sometimes it's a matter of my tastes changing, but, more often, it's a case of in-the-moment thoughts and feelings that surrounded the photo finally dying down, cooling off, and allowing me to see the photo abstracted from the experience. I find that to be a helpful way to collect and to cull.

Another happy accident is when I can see a through-line somehow in photos which were taken in a widely different time period or setting, or with much different gear. Whenever I see those things emerge it gives me the hope that I might one day develop a unique style. In a sense, the different photos converge together over time, as I whittle away the ones which stand in between them. I try not to make this a conscious part of my culling process, though. I don't want to "force" a style. When I do, I find that I'm really just imitating some other photographer's style.

How about you? Do you have a specific culling process? Mind you when I use the word I'm talking about something different than just deleting the bad photos, the ones which never worked. My curation centers around this slow culling process, but you may have a different way of putting together your photos. I'd be interested in hearing that, as well.

 

[Iron]

How about you? Do you have a specific culling process?

Interesting thought.

Flickr's Camera Roll is very useful for such activity. I like the idea that everything is laid out for previewing in square format and sectioned per date. When I was actively using Flickr I just delete whatever I don't like on the camera roll page. Now, my Flickr account is used primarily for my macro work, so I can remove the ones I don't like easily. My macro work is published online mostly, so it's more like soft-publication.

Regarding my general work, I always keep whatever I shoot, except for the dark frames when doing flash photography and I use RawTherapee for archiving and assessing my photos. Adobe Lightroom is the benchmark for such archiving/organising but RawTherapee's per date handling of "film rolls" is good enough. That's just for organising my RAWs and JPEGs. By the way, I have set my Pentax to create folders per date, so I will just have to rename the folder for archiving.

My ultimate publication is with printing and I always have a theme whenever I create a set of prints or when doing a photo book. Culling is more like general filtering for this kind of activity. Our photos paint a lot of words so I choose carefully what I want to publish and make sure that the thought flow is consistent.

Whenever I see those things emerge it gives me the hope that I might one day develop a unique style.

We shoot for ourselves, at least if we are not doing pro work, so the style is already subconsciously there. You already have a style. You may not see it but your viewers, like us, do. Either consciously or subconsciously.

 

[bdbits]

I am terrible about getting my photos into a finished state and actually putting them in front of someone, even my wife. Thus, I have an embarassingly large backlog. But if I do think something turns out particularly well, it sounds silly but I will often set it as my computer "wallpaper". I actually don't see a bare desktop that often as I usually have lots of windows open, but I do see it now and then and on the lock screen. Seeing it day after day, I begin to notice details and compositional things I might not otherwise notice, oddly enough, and things that might look better tweaked a bit. If I don't like the image, I soon switch the wallpaper to the next one. And I generally look through archived folders (organized by year/month) now and then, and sometimes delete things but not often.

 

[agentlossing]

We shoot for ourselves, at least if we are not doing pro work, so the style is already subconsciously there. You already have a style. You may not see it but your viewers, like us, do. Either consciously or subconsciously.

That's good stuff. However, something I've noticed about my own stuff is that I can unconsciously fall into imitation. It's easy for me to do, and I don't like it - I know it's good to imitate the art you like, but I have felt like it's time to move past that for a while now. So, part of my culling process is to recognize what's derivative once I've grown a bit more detached from it. I'm sure I have a style in there somewhere, but I think I'm finding it subtractively.

 

[Iron]

However, something I've noticed about my own stuff is that I can unconsciously fall into imitation.

I think you just defined being inspired. We may somehow fall into what you have described a lot just because of how we consume media and photos nowadays. They're just everywhere. Some of our living photography legends are inspired by those before them. Daido Moriyama, for example, is inspired by the works of Jack Kerouac, William Klein, Weegee, Andy Warhol, the writings of Yukio Mishima and Edo era paintings, and the elements coming from those inspirations are written all over his work.

 

[JensM]

Interesting topic!

I tend not to cull much other than the obviously unsharp stuff or "accidentally" taken ones, but then again my workflow really isn't up to much, more based around "intuitively" pushing and pulling levers in LR.

Then again, I came rather late to the RAW game, even if I shot it occasionally before 2016, so much of the take from 2002 to 2015 are JPEGs on P&S gear. I did try culling for a stint, but am glad that I had back-ups of the stuff, after it turned out that much of it wasn't un-sharp or faulty, but the then PC was lagging so much that it didnt get to load the pictures fully, before they where black-flagged and on to the next one that got the same treatment.

Then again, I am not a high volume shooter per see, yearly take in normal years are normally about 5K all in more lately, and can dab with the hoard as I see fit, storage is cheap, there are, if not gold, so silver and bronze to be found in the herd and I sometimes re-edit or edits years after the picture was taken. I really should set some goals for myself towards actually providing output, other than for SOME.

 

[Bart J D]

I go through the set and give a star to what could possibly be ok. The files in the set have their keywords applied at this stage.
Second pass and go to two stars if applicable.
Look at groups and try to pick the one that represents that group best. The others go back to 1. This is based on details and overall look and is the most difficult stage for me.
I often pauze at this stage and come back in the next days.
When this is finished, I set the remaining files to three and go through them, demoting the files that I now find lacking.
I spread this process from the first step to the last over multiple days or weeks.
The files that "made the cut" go into a DxO PL Project and get edited. Occasionally, some more get removed from the Project.
Output to jpg and dng.
Next, I go through the dng files to decide which get converted to b&w. I still consider my b&w's as my "final output".

This is a hobby / passion for me, not a profession

 

[Acraftman]

I am incrementally working towards what makes me happy taking photo's. I gave up a few years back the thought that if I don't get it right in camera its a bad photo which brings up my processing ability. As time has passed and this is where the increment really comes in I am getting a little better at achieving what I thought the photo was going to look like when I shot it. I am always surprised when I look at a photo from a few years ago how much more pleased with it now that my editing abilities are improving.
I think another thing I have gotten a better grip on is culling. I know what is probably NOT going to look better in a couple of years.

 

[agentlossing]

I think you just defined being inspired. We may somehow fall into what you have described a lot just because of how we consume media and photos nowadays. They're just everywhere. Some of our living photography legends are inspired by those before them. Daido Moriyama, for example, is inspired by the works of Jack Kerouac, William Klein, Weegee, Andy Warhol, the writings of Yukio Mishima and Edo era paintings, and the elements coming from those inspirations are written all over his work.

Hmm, I think it depends on the personal creative process... for myself, I think when my mind is "inspired by" a favorite past photographer, my work ends up being a little too much like theirs, at least as far as I can make it so. Even when I am not trying to. It's like I put on a pair of glasses that filters what I see through the stylings of someone else. Even when I make good images that way, I can't say they are my favorite long-term. That's part of the service that culling does for me, by looking back over the photos that I thought were good, but which, to my mind, somehow came from a place other than me.

It might be a little bit like some authors being heavily into pastiche, accidentally. C.S. Lewis is a good example of this with his fiction. He was a bit of a chameleon who would be influenced by whoever he was close to at the time. The clearest indication of this was in his space trilogy, where the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, were written when he was close to J.R.R. Tolkien and show it, while the final book, That Hideous Strength, was written after he and Tolkien drifted apart later on, and Lewis was more heavily influenced by the writer Charles Williams (who was more surrealist and metaphysical than the more grounded Tolkien).

 

[agentlossing]

Interesting topic!

I tend not to cull much other than the obviously unsharp stuff or "accidentally" taken ones, but then again my workflow really isn't up to much, more based around "intuitively" pushing and pulling levers in LR.

Then again, I came rather late to the RAW game, even if I shot it occasionally before 2016, so much of the take from 2002 to 2015 are JPEGs on P&S gear. I did try culling for a stint, but am glad that I had back-ups of the stuff, after it turned out that much of it wasn't un-sharp or faulty, but the then PC was lagging so much that it didnt get to load the pictures fully, before they where black-flagged and on to the next one that got the same treatment.

Then again, I am not a high volume shooter per see, yearly take in normal years are normally about 5K all in more lately, and can dab with the hoard as I see fit, storage is cheap, there are, if not gold, so silver and bronze to be found in the herd and I sometimes re-edit or edits years after the picture was taken. I really should set some goals for myself towards actually providing output, other than for SOME.

I think re-editing is a great thing. I've been able to "find" some images I really like by going back and changing some of the (usually more heavy-handed) editing I've done in past years. Editing is definitely part of my creative vision, so it makes sense that as things change, editing style changes as well. Of course, technical proficiency is also a part of that. I'm a slow learner.

 

[doobs]

I think re-editing is a great thing. I've been able to "find" some images I really like by going back and changing some of the (usually more heavy-handed) editing I've done in past years. Editing is definitely part of my creative vision, so it makes sense that as things change, editing style changes as well. Of course, technical proficiency is also a part of that. I'm a slow learner.

This is exactly why I discard very few of my captures.

Post processing software has come a long way in the 20+ years I've been capturing digital images.

What I do have a lot of trouble with is assigning ratings.

As a result I really don't do it other than useable or not.

Perhaps one day I'll figure it out..?

 

[John King]

This is exactly why I discard very few of my captures.

Post processing software has come a long way in the 20+ years I've been capturing digital images.

What I do have a lot of trouble with is assigning ratings.

As a result I really don't do it other than useable or not.

Perhaps one day I'll figure it out..?

I'll go along with this, Chris ...

 

[gryphon1911]

I edit relatively mercilessly, but leave a lot in my catalog. I then go back after a year and re-visit what I've shot. By then I'll have a different perspective on what I shot then and do another round. I at one time had around 150,000 images in my catalog - spanning from 2005 until 2021. I went through a massive culling and dropped it down to 50,000. There were a lot of images that were there due to my business at the time. Since I no longer needed them, only the "portfolio quality" images were kept. I also removed a bunch of images due to redundancy. I figure if someone doesn't ask about the images in 365 days or I have not had need to use them for anything in that time period, it is safe for me to remove the dead weight.

 

[wee-pics]

This is exactly why I discard very few of my captures.

Post processing software has come a long way in the 20+ years I've been capturing digital images.

What I do have a lot of trouble with is assigning ratings.

As a result I really don't do it other than useable or not.

Perhaps one day I'll figure it out..?

I quite agree with you, Chris. Rating is for me not worth the trouble. One reason is that I throw away everything that's technically poor (exposure, sharpness, etc.). The other reason - and that's what cam feedback has taught me - is that other people rate my photos differently from me. Quite often I get only few reactions for a photo I considered really good. Or lots of reactions for a photo I considered mediocre. Other people see other things obviously in my shots. So my only ration is "bin" or "keeper".

As to PP software: with the options we have now I've come to some spectacular results of digital photos I took with my first digital Olympus: the bridge camera C-5050 that filled the gap between the OM-4 and the E-M5 just for trying out the new technology. So I was pretty happy I hadn't discarded those shots.

I have now two main folders: one with all the originals (on the external HD), one with all the processed shots on my workstation (copy of this on external HD as well), this is my "positive selection" ... without ratings. Finding the original to any of these is easy as the folders have the same hierarchy by their names: year-month-date + place or event. The processed photos have the original file name of the camera with".1"added before ".jpg".
I'm glad I started this right when I began PP. I seldom search long for a specific old shot (in between 15K to 45K per year).

 

[agentlossing]

I'm back to mulling over the culling and curation thing. Interestingly, my Flickr is still hovering around 500 photos. It seems to be the tipping point for me. Uploading many new ones sets me going through the old ones looking for the ones I'm not enthused with anymore. I find it mildly funny that I am frequently undercutting Flickr's counter for total views of my images. I've never climbed all the way to 1 million views because I get rid of old photos which sometimes have a lot of views (but, if I wanted to gauge by audience reaction - which I almost never do - they have a lot of views versus favorites, so people may look at them but not necessarily feel inspired to click the favorite button).

The latest thing I've been chewing over isn't so much the curation aspect, but more compositional stuff. Specifically, I'm trying to understand balance. And I notice that my images aren't very balanced much of the time.

I've also pared down the number of albums on my Flickr, trying to focus the types of albums I create to be a bit more coherent.

 

[John King]

I'm back to mulling over the culling and curation thing. Interestingly, my Flickr is still hovering around 500 photos. It seems to be the tipping point for me. Uploading many new ones sets me going through the old ones looking for the ones I'm not enthused with anymore. I find it mildly funny that I am frequently undercutting Flickr's counter for total views of my images. I've never climbed all the way to 1 million views because I get rid of old photos which sometimes have a lot of views (but, if I wanted to gauge by audience reaction - which I almost never do - they have a lot of views versus favorites, so people may look at them but not necessarily feel inspired to click the favorite button).

The latest thing I've been chewing over isn't so much the curation aspect, but more compositional stuff. Specifically, I'm trying to understand balance. And I notice that my images aren't very balanced much of the time.

I've also pared down the number of albums on my Flickr, trying to focus the types of albums I create to be a bit more coherent.

Composition of form and colour has always been the hardest part of photography for me too, Andrew.

A couple of books that helped specifically:

Several books helped me along the way:

Freeman Patterson "Photography and the Art of Seeing"

Harald Mante "The Photograph Composition and Colour Design"

Michael Freeman "The Photographer's Eye"

Biver Fuqua et al "Light Science and Magic"

A cut and paste from a document I wrote years ago:

Recommended Reading for Photographers

Currently there are a total of nine books on my syllabus list.

One on cameras and photography generally.
There are many good books on this, I have Michael Freeman's "Mastering Digital Photography". At A$55, this was the most expensive of all them here!
The Owner’s Manual for one’s specific camera is extraordinarily important!

One on exposure
Bryan Peterson – “Understanding Exposure”

Two on composition
Michael Freeman - "The Photographer's Eye"
Harald Mante - "The Photograph (Composition and Color Design)"

One on seeing
Freeman Patterson - "Photography and the Art of Seeing (A visual perception workshop for film and digital photography)".
I have both the third and fourth editions of this book. The third edition is only available second hand, but is by far the better of the two in that the illustrative photographs are far better, IMO.

One on lighting
Hunter, Biver, Fuqua - "Light: Science and Magic", now in its third edition since 1990.

Two on post-processing
one of these is a methodology: Scott Kelby's - "Seven Point System for Adobe Photoshop" and
one is about getting the best use out of Adobe Camera Raw: Schewe & Fraser - "Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS5"

Personally, I view Photoshop (etc) as an add-on to PP in ACR, not the other way around. Both numbers (8) & (9) concentrate on this approach.

IMO, the above-mentioned books cover almost everything one should know in order to be a competent photographer.

It is my opinion that every single photographer would benefit in at least some way from the possession and reading of these books. I base that statement on over 50 years of looking at photographs ...

HTH

 

[tilman]

Composition for me is a more intuitive process… That’s why a tripod really doesn’t work for me - I often try multiple different “angles” (and later often select the first one of the series - with my composition getting worse the more I think about it… Losing sight of the image I initially saw…)
Sometimes it’s the last of the series too Rarely in the middle.

For culling it definitely helps to put some time between the taking of the photographs and the culling process... Looking back at older photos, I sometimes wonder why I picked a certain one over the other... Having some distance will help with being a more objective editor of your own work

 

[agentlossing]

I've had a further thought for the photo libraries I have on my hard drives. I have pretty much always kept a folder system in Windows separated by either format or camera (for example, the GRIIIx and K-1 have their own folders, but my M4/3 gear is all in an M4/3 folder - that could change but who knows), then by year, then by month. Makes it easy enough to find what I am looking for. But the sheer preponderance of my photo collection has been a little overwhelming lately, so I'm trying to find a better way.

I am not one of those people who keeps every photo they shoot, but I do like to keep a lot of photos that I'm not specifically pleased with or interested in. The maybes, the ones which are redundant but slightly different versions or where composition or subject is just a bit different. If they're virtually the same, I delete the near-copies, but if there's enough of a difference I'll usually keep them. However, as the photos accumulate, it gets very hard to find what I want. I've been trying to look back through my photos to discern some trends or ideas that I may not consciously have, but I'm drowning in all of the "too interesting to delete, but not interesting enough to show off" photos.

So I think I'm going to go back through the folders within the parent folder (M4/3, K-1, etc.) and create a new folder, into which will go every single maybe image and all of the stuff that's not directly interesting to me but not quite a "delete." It won't have the tight arrangement of the monthly folders, but I can always sort by date. I think this will give me back a little sanity.

 

[John King]

I've had a further thought for the photo libraries I have on my hard drives. I have pretty much always kept a folder system in Windows separated by either format or camera (for example, the GRIIIx and K-1 have their own folders, but my M4/3 gear is all in an M4/3 folder - that could change but who knows), then by year, then by month. Makes it easy enough to find what I am looking for. But the sheer preponderance of my photo collection has been a little overwhelming lately, so I'm trying to find a better way.

I am not one of those people who keeps every photo they shoot, but I do like to keep a lot of photos that I'm not specifically pleased with or interested in. The maybes, the ones which are redundant but slightly different versions or where composition or subject is just a bit different. If they're virtually the same, I delete the near-copies, but if there's enough of a difference I'll usually keep them. However, as the photos accumulate, it gets very hard to find what I want. I've been trying to look back through my photos to discern some trends or ideas that I may not consciously have, but I'm drowning in all of the "too interesting to delete, but not interesting enough to show off" photos.

So I think I'm going to go back through the folders within the parent folder (M4/3, K-1, etc.) and create a new folder, into which will go every single maybe image and all of the stuff that's not directly interesting to me but not quite a "delete." It won't have the tight arrangement of the monthly folders, but I can always sort by date. I think this will give me back a little sanity.

Andrew, Adobe Bridge is your friend, as is keywording.

 

[agentlossing]

Andrew, Adobe Bridge is your friend, as is keywording.

Thanks John, I do need to try that program out. This is also partially storage management, as my hard drives are set up as separate drive letters, with different camera/for at folders on different drives, and I want to bring my better stuff together so it's faster and easier to make and keep backups.