Throwing out the trash
Posted on January 10, 2009
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been doing a lot of photography of late.
Now, the way I shoot, I take a lot of images. My camera can take in about 4 per second, and at times, I take advantage of that. The downside of this can be that I get a lot of crap photos and duplicates to sort through, and that can be kind of a downer.
When I’m reviewing the images from a shoot, I tend to focus on the not so good ones – looking at what I did wrong, and generally bringing myself down. It can be really easy for me to fall into a mild slump of “Oh, god, I’m crap. Why did I ever think I was any good at this?”, when all I’m seeing is crappy photo after crappy photo.
Once I realised what I was doing, the solution was quite simple.
First, throw out the trash.
Once I recognise that the image is junk, I hit the ‘9′ key, which marks that image as rejected. This removes it from the thumbnail list of images, and hides it away where I won’t accidentally see it again. If I do this on every terminally flawed image on my first or second pass through them, fairly quickly I end up with a (smaller) collection of images I rather like. Sometimes I’ll discard as many as half the images, but the half that remains don’t have any glaring problems.
Unsurprisingly, then I feel quite good about them all.
Throwing out the trash quickly puts me in a better frame of mind for the rest of the work, I get more done and since I only have to sort between “good” and “great”, it’s a lot easier to pick out the really good images.
In the rest of my life, the same thing. Clean out your desk if you want to get a good frame of mind for work. Cleaning up as you prepare a meal, leaving your work area uncluttered and puts you in a better frame of mind when you’ve finished. Discard those negative feelings and regrets, and just move on with the good parts of your life. Find a song that annoys you in your MP3 collection, delete it!
Anything which doesn’t add value to your life, you can label as trash, and act appropriately.
What have you thrown out today?
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