We had a dog show this weekend. An obedience trial. Rather than showing how wonderful my dogs are, I took pictures instead. A lot of them, in fact. Close to 300 on the istD. Had I been shooting film, I would probably have shot perhaps 1/3 that number, maybe less.
So, what's the problem with this? I am quickly being inundated with images. I deleted over 50 from this weekend as being absolute crap, probably, I should delete another hundred and 50 for being lesser crap. Had I been shooting film, I would still have tossed half the pictures. So what's the problem? Just delete the files and forget them, right? After all, it didn't cost me anything to shoot them, no film was wasted, and no prints were made, right? Well sure, but I just wasted an hour looking at what turned out to be 2/3s crap, and plucked 34 images out of the mire that may be worth looking at. Had I been shooting film, I would have spent perhaps 30 dollars on film and processing, probably would have still had a couple of dozen good images to look at, and would have spent about 5 minutes culling the garbage. To my credit, I shot a lot of subjects that I wouldn't have shot otherwise, which is good. And I got, I am sure, a good picture that I wouldn't have gotten on film, perhaps even more than one. However, there is still the time factor involved in looking at several hundred pictures, and then culling out 90 percent right off the start. The law of diminishing returns is definitely at work here. On a more positive note, I did the award photos. One of the recipients was a young lady with a GSD. I didn't get any good shots of both of them, but in two pictures, I got a good shot of each. I ended up doing a cut and paste, and got a good picture of both, which is kind of cool. So that's how I spent my weekend. William Robb
