@autumnleaf: thomas has taught me (thru his blog) about the power and fun of giving away many (most) of your images – try it! PS – He does some ‘pix for hire’ too.

@thomas: IMO don’t edit any, they’re history … some of the most amazing images in our world today arose many years later from the negatives (never printed) of photographers who had died. What you don’t like, others may love … or it may prove to have a historical significance. Archiving is a noble gesture to our future generations.

I read your post with great inspiration after discovering your work on Flickr.

Anyways, the comment I’m most drawn to in you your post is how you average up to 300 shots per day. How do you find your subject matter and then proceed in taking this many images?

I try to get 1 quality shot per day, and only average around 10 shots. But if I could increase the amounts of shots taken, I’d certainly increase the amounts of quality pics.

I am very impressed with your determination to create a mega-huge body of work. I’m sure it is quite a challenge to meet these sorts of personal goals, as we all find ourselves in periodic slumps.

Nonetheless, you take a lot of pics and you take a lot of quality pics at that. Thanks for doing what you do, and this is going to provide me a source fuel for the creative mind.

I shot over 4000 images in 2006 and I only started taking photos more seriously in September. A few more years of this and we’re getting close to your level.

All we need now is a 10TB seagate drive and all the problems go. (except backup that is)

It’s great to hear your plans and to see your inspiring photos. I’d love to know how you manage your workflow. I have a few thousand photo’s but haven’t yet get a proper system in place – I know I need to as I’ve started to shoot in RAW now. Also, what’s the best way of doing back-ups for collections? External hard drive(s)?

I don’t think any photos should be deleted. They all document something, whether the quality is good or bad.

Reading this post and the comments sparked a thought. Bridge etc all use the star rating system so you can grade your photos or highlight the ones you want to go back to and edit. How about Zooomer using a similar feature? You could have a rating system that is only visible to you. You can then quickly find the photos you love/want to keep and those you don’t (using a set). Taking Raoul’s blog entry further about asking Zooomer users to give feedback on photos he should consider deleting, why not have a star grading system that visitors can use. This way you get an added dimension – comments plus rating. It would certainly help in a constructive way to get an idea of what people think of your photos. You could then have your popular photos by view and by rating. As you say, when they are your photos it’s hard to be objective and this might help. Just a thought.

By the way, I’m enjoying Zooomer. I’m getting to grips with it and want to use the account to showcase my better photos.

Ian

How do you organize your photos? I’ve been using Photoshop Elements 5 on Windows, and I like it, but I’m not sure it will scale to the kind of numbers you have.

Carl

Eventually I hope to get the 100,000 images that I consider “processed” all online.

Great comments on the backup idea as well. I do a similar thing with my family and that is I bring a hard drive full of processed photos (especially family photos) and dump them on their computers at Holiday’s etc. They like to see them and it provides a unique offsite backup.

Right now I’ve got multiple backups of my processed photos both onsite and offsite and onsite hard drive backups of most of my RAW working files.

With hard drives it’s not a matter of if it will fail but when and I’m trying to be very careful about how I store all of these images.

Thanks for sharing your personal goals and your insight into how you’re progressing towards those goals. Not many people are generous enough to share that (of course, not many people even have personal goals these days).

When you get your wall-to-ceiling gallery show, please let me know. I will be there.

Andy Frazer

To be clear, I still advocate aggressive editing of the shots I take – I probably put up only about 1/20th or so of the photos that I shoot on public sites like flickr. The photos that go in my shows are an even smaller subset – probably 1 in 500 or so.

However, I don’t believe in deleting photos from my archives – even the failures – often I learn the most from my failures, and they help me to learn from my mistakes. I’ve found that I take so few photos that are of such low quality (lens cap on, totally out of focus, etc) that with my workflow, I just leave those in the archive and rate them with a bottom rating.

The funny thing is that you don’t even know what you’ve got in your shot sometimes until years later, remember that snap of Bill Clinton kissig Monica Lewinsky on some reception line somewhere? I guarantee that that picture wasn’t one oht epicks of that photographer of that moment – he had to look back through his archives for it.

And with the cost of hard disks and DVD-Rs coming down to such a reasonable level, I find that the costs are small to archive all my shots. I even make a trick to do “distributed backups” – I burn DVDs of all the shots I took that year, and make 5-6 copies, and send them out to my parents and siblings as holiday gifts – that way, they get family pictures, and I get relatively disaster-proof backup and storage

Dave