Sony A7II, FE 28-70 f3.5-5.6 OSS
I've spent some time over the past couple days doing a major cleanup of my Flickr stream. I was up around 2800 images and trimmed down to 1940 or so images.
Mostly I cleaned out a mix of old 'found item' shots, mediocre street photography and uninteresting cityscape work. I was largely focused on preserving images that had some significant engagement, as well as some of the stronger images that may not have gotten as much notice.
I think the end result is a much stronger Flickr stream, and one that focuses more on what I shoot today, rather than being 50% 'guy with a camera wandering around finding random crap' and 50% 'photographer shooting interesting subjects'
The one thing I do need to decide is how to approach some of the stronger or more popular images that really don't match up well with my overall body of work. I'm primarily a landscape and nature photographer. I dabble in cityscape. I'm not a street photographer, a portrait photographer or an aviation or automotive photographer and I'm not sure if I want to just cut some of the strong or popular images of those types out of my stream, especially since those genres dominate my earlier posted work. I'd like to have a solid body of work that dates back to 2005 when I joined Flickr, but a lot of that work just doesn't match what I do today.
That must have been tough to do Adam! When I look at my Flickr stream, it's like saying hello to some old friends! Oh to be sure, there are some that could be deleted but I'm not ready to say goodbye to them just yet.
ReplyDeleteI've been "into" photography for a long time but I learned early on that I wasn't going to be a great photographer. Every once in a while I see somebody's work and I go...oh yeah....they've got it....only a few reach those lofty heights imo! For me, I am content to be just a good photographer.
Covid restrictions have really cut into my photography. That and Apple getting rid of my main Aperature editing programme that I used for about 10 years. Then there is the problem of storage and it's all combined to take the fun out of photography. So enjoy it while you can and when you look at your work don't be too critical....if it brings you pleasure to view them, then that's enough in my books!
Cheers!
Lyle
Lyle,
DeleteIt's not as hard as it sounds once you get into the habit of it. This is the third or fourth time I've done this and it gets easier every time. But I view my Flickr more as my public face, not my personal archive of images and that helps with things.
I'll freely admit I'm not a great photographer. Instead I'm a vicious editor. I shoot a lot of frames and post very few of them, which makes my posted work look a lot better than my archives. There's some folks who go out and take 3 frames and get two amazing images. I take 500 and get two good images.
I know what you mean about storage and software. I've have a lot of drives kicking around, mostly filled with RAW files. I've been shooting digital seriously now for over 15 years and I have a huge set of archives. Film is even worse, I've over 1000 rolls of negatives squirrelled away. For software, I got sucked into the Adobe side of things and have never managed to quite get out.