January 12, 2012

upward: beyond shutter-happy







One of my new years resolutions (or several of them, I guess) dealt with clutter...physical as well as photographic.  Take fewer, better photos, and get rid of the (physical and virtual) junk that you've collected over the past several years.
Tonight I undertook the cleansing of my external hard drive.  The thing has a capacity of 500GB, and while some of that is music and other smaller things, the vast majority of it is photos...and it's full.  I can not illustrate the VOLUMES of bad photos I've collected.  For so long, I felt that I should never be rid of any photos.  Keep them all, just in case.
I don't need thousands of blurry/out of focus/repetitive/uninteresting/pointless/all-of-the-above photos.  I don't.  So, little by little, I'm going to work on it.  I started with 2009, perhaps one of my most shutter-happy years, and am so nervous to make my way into the summer months...that summer I didn't have a job and I discovered Flickr so all I did was take pointless photos and upload, upload, upload...but for every upload, there were thirty or forty or fifty shots that didn't make the cut...they need to go.
The above photos were taken on April 1, 2009.  I took a walk from my dorm to the horticulture garden, and it was one of the first times I had visited the place.  For the longest time, I was thrilled with these photos.  So proud of them.  I still think a few of them are decent, but I can certainly tell that I've done a lot of learning and growing as a photographer since then.  The only way to get better is to practice, practice, practice, and practice I did...I've gotten plenty of *bad* photos out of my system (and soon, off my computer...they've served their purpose!)
My blog used to be called shutter-happy...now it's not.  I know it still says shutter-happy in the description, and it's still true to an extent...I've just moved beyond needing (multiple) photos of every mundane detail I come across.  Happiness is a handful of good photos, rather than a bucket of mediocre ones :)

*as I clean out this hard drive of mine, you may see more old-photo posts, especially from travels...I forsee that happening if I find shareable collections :)

4 comments:

  1. Kind of makes me wish me wish I had my old crappy photos on an external hard drive. I have a huge collection of CDs, each one has VERY FEW photos worth keeping. I'm proud of you for decluttering your life!

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  2. waterdrops are always so photogenic. :)

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  3. Green :) i like it

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    Check out my blog http://vancouverlovesme.blogspot.com/

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  4. keeping the "imperfect" photos show growth and your journey. Don't get too "delete happy."

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