Keep all your pictures and shoot RAW - you just never know!

I have often heard people say “keep all your pictures, you never know…” or something along those lines and probably a lot more eloquently put than that!  Until I started to take my photography more seriously I didn’t realize the value of that statement.

I mean I have folders of pictures from uni days and so on so I have always been in the habit of keeping pictures – that or I am too lazy to sort them haha.  But seriously I think I find it very hard to delete pictures because they are moments of time that have been snatched from life and immortalized and I think that is kinda cool.

But there is an even more significant reason I think for keeping your pictures – especially if you shoot them in RAW format.  Photography is a journey where you are constantly learning new things, picking up new tricks and, in this digital world, where new and wonderful software is constantly arriving to give us options and new ways to express our creativity.

Couple this with RAW files and you have a library of light that you can constantly return to - old pictures can be reworked and brought to life in new and exciting ways that you weren’t even thinking about when you took the picture!  I think shooting in RAW is crucial to this process as it lets you keep a file that you can work and rework to death, safe in the knowledge that you are not degrading the file or that light information in anyway.  I heard Trey Ratcliff say that jpegs are like little wafers of light where as RAWs are like huge wedges of light that can be molded, information extracted and sculpted in a diverse number of ways and he is spot on.

Take a look at the examples below, both shots look fine in their original form and I was really happy with them when I took them and processed them the first time round.  Since then I have learned a whole lot more though about post processing and it is really fun to go back and take these older shots and breathe new life into them through new techniques that I have learned along the way.

Narrow neck sunrise - taken and edited March 2014

Same shot as above, this time edited a week ago (November 2014)

Since then I have learned a whole lot more though about post processing and it is really fun to go back and take these older shots and breathe new life into them through new techniques that I have learned along the way.

Maori Bay Muriwai - taken and edited February 2014

Same shot re-edited August 2014 - love the sky effect I learnt for this one!

Keep your pictures, all of them, you never know when you will want to revisit them. And shoot in RAW - RAW is not scary!  Sure it’s weird to down load files onto the computer for the first time and see blank white files, soon though you’ll recognize those files as little white blank canvases with a treasure trove of information waiting to be unlocked and transformed by your own artistic visions.  That vision can change and it will but that is natural and it is really cool to know you have a stack of files to go back through and re-work till your heart is content!!

That one picture you were never sure about could become one of your most favorite, so make sure you keep them all.