Keepers?

I hear the term "keeper" tossed around frequently . A keeper can be a lot of different things to different people and I imagine some people scratching their heads wondering if we all have the same keeper criteria.? I have tossed pics in the trash over the decades not because of the image quality or focus or exposure but because they were just not interesting enough to impress me . I'd need a box car to store pics back in the film days if I wasn't picky.Pics of family are always keepers regardless of image quality. Besides family pics what keeps you from trashing a pic. Is a keeper to you any image that is actually not blurry or very poorly exposed? What's your keeper look like and what will you do with all those keepers in the end?

bgreg wrote:

I hear the term "keeper" tossed around frequently . A keeper can be a lot of different things to different people and I imagine some people scratching their heads wondering if we all have the same keeper criteria.? I have tossed pics in the trash over the decades not because of the image quality or focus or exposure but because they were just not interesting enough to impress me . I'd need a box car to store pics back in the film days if I wasn't picky.Pics of family are always keepers regardless of image quality. Besides family pics what keeps you from trashing a pic. Is a keeper to you any image that is actually not blurry or very poorly exposed? What's your keeper look like and what will you do with all those keepers in the end?

I've had photos that I glossed over when I first took it thinking it just wasn't interesting, but then I went back and decided to just try editing and now it's a very cool looking image. So yeah, I only throw away photos that I missed focus on or it's so bad that I can't really use any part of it.

Here's the image I was talking about:

Original

Edited

At first, the image just appeared to be a boring snapshot, but as I was scrolling through my photos, the roots caught my eye and I liked the way they leaded the eye into the background so I started playing with a moody type edit and I was pleasantly surprised and now I like the photo 😊

M Stewart wrote:

I tend to keep every image (and scan of silver-based photos). I have automatically backed up hard-drives, and I try to briefly annotate images as I take them. The artistic worth of what I store is very low, but it's of interest to me, and occasionally to my family.

In my collection I do have a selfie* taken by my grandfather (when a teenager) of him, and my great-grandfather. The shot was taken in Salford, Lancs, UK. *The selfie was taken by my grandfather pulling a string, visible in the shot, which tripped the shutter on the tripod mounted camera. It's my only image of my great-grandfather.

Images like those are priceless. Since my grandson was born 9 yrs ago, I have documented his growth in about 5000 images, saved in triplicate in various places from usb drives in safe deposit boxes to several drives and cloud storage. Something for him to show his future family. All my other shots from decades past of things and places of interest only to me are probably never to be viewed by anyone but me. I'm afraid I may be approaching my own expiration date in the not so distant future and I often think what will become of the large amounts of images I have taken over the years. I would not burden anyone to store them until they were discarded. I suppose it doesn't matter once I quit breathing.

“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

keepers = those that remain after the unwanted ones are deleted

a keeper = one of the keepers

It is impossible to come up with a set of generally accepted criteria for “keepers” as they are contextual and subjective. Sharpness and proper exposure alone are not useful criteria for keepers. These days, the notion of “good enough” prevails among snapshots taken with camera phones.

I happen to enjoy the process of creating photographic images “in the field” much more than doing elaborate post-processing adjustments “in the lab,” so I tend to shoot to keep or to delete — simple for me.

What is my first criterion for deletion? Boring. Second? Out-of-focus. Third? Camera shake, or unintended subject movement. Fourth? Photo bombs.

Ansel Adams: “You are responsible for everything within the frame.”

Is the below a keeper? Well, to me, for now, it is.

iPad screen capture, from a Google Photos album