Why you shouldn't delete crappy photos you take with a digital camera.

[Tiberius]

I was out on Virginia Water Lake yesterday (literally walking on the lake since it froze over) taking pictures. I haven't uploaded them yet, since I'm still sorting through them all, but there was one in particular I thought I'd share because at the time I considered deleting it.

There is a nice man-made waterfall near to the lake, so I thought I'd take a few pictures of it. By this time, it was getting pretty dark, so I was quickly messing around with settings on my camera to try and compensate (I don't use a flash outdoors, especially in the snow; it makes the photos look unnatural). The photo I was going for was a 10 second exposure (meaning the shutter lets in light for 10 seconds rather than the usual fraction of a second), so that the water on the waterfall would blur for a nice effect, and also brighten up the picture (more light = more bright...duh).

However, it was just too dark, and I didn't set the exposure compensation properly, so the picture was still a dark mess; utterly unusable. I considered deleting it at the time, but thought better of it, and decided I would see what I could do in an image editor back home.

So I got back, and the first thing I did (in iPhoto) was increase the exposure so the picture brightened up, whilst reducing the contrast a bit. I increased the shadows setting to brighten up a few of the remaining dark bits, and finally went crazy with the temperature setting, moving it from the horrible blue it was to a more realistic warm red. The result was a photo that looks like it was taken on a bright sunny day, rather than the overcast and gloomy one it was.

Here is a before and after:



So yeah, the next time you take a crappy photo, don't delete it. Get a big memory card so you can store thousands of photos, and keep it until you get home, where you may be able to turn it into a perfect memory. Remember, the LCD screen on the back of most digital cameras will make every photo you take look worse than it does on the computer screen anyway, so use it as a way of making sure you got the general photo you were aiming for; don't use it for quality control.

[theVOID]

Nice work

[Rhizomorph13]

That is a pretty shot Adrian!

[Welsh cake]

Fantastic work!

Sadly all Photo Impact it did for me is show up how ugly my thumb looks.

[Shell B]

I like both, to be honest. I love the way it looks with the snow. You should sell prints of that.

[Autumnlicious]

Good work.

However, I take issue with your choice of "crappy" as a category for your photos. In all my time messing with digital photography, "crappy" is the category given to heavily grained/blurred shots. The shot you referenced was quite salvageable in any photo editor through merely adjusting the levels and adjusting the bias of the colors.

The lesson here is not about deleting bad photos, but about learning where to define the limits for salvageable and unsalvageable photos, taking into account the ability to adjust photos in software.

[Anomalocaris]

You should alway bracket your shot if your camera is able.

[Autumnlicious]

Indeed. I've found that one can combine multiple exposures to get appropriate lights and darks.