Why Delete Bad Photos?
An ABC News story freaks out about people with digital cameras deleting pictures they think are not worth keeping,
The cameras are convenient, stylish, and — this is crucial — virtually every model allows you to delete a picture on the spot if it did not come out the way you wanted.
To historians, that delete function may not be a good thing. It has done more than change photography. It has changed the way we record our lives.
Of the 1,000 or so photos I take every month, I usually delete 2 or 3 — typically taken just to test the white balance or other features, and sometimes I feel guilty and leave those in anyways.
Storing a digital photograph costs almost nothing. I’m using a relatively expensive portable 2.5″ drive to store my photos, so it costs about 1 penny per photo stored. If I were just saving them all to my desktop drive it would be something closer to 1/3rd of a penny per drive.
Flash memory is also cheap (unless you’re using a camera with a proprietary system, like Sony’s Memory Stick). You can pick up a 1 gb SD card for under $300 today (I’ve got a couple) and a 1 gb CF card for significantly less than that.
The rule for digital photographers should be — shoot some photos, shoot some more, then shoot even more as every successive image costs so close to $0 that the additional expense isn’t noticeable.
Especially when you consider how much non-digital photography costs. At my brother’s recent wedding I took about 700 photos with my digital camera and about 200 with a film camera. For what it cost me just to develop the film and get prints, I could have bought another digital camera.
Source:
Don’t Touch That Button. Ned Potter, ABC News, August 11, 2004.
Tags: Data Storage, Digital Photography
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Aug 12th, 2004
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