I tend to be a packrat, saving every bit and scrap of things I encounter in my life, whether it's a piece of ribbon from my daughter's pajamas or a dead flowerhead from a bouquet. The way my mind works, "you just never know" when you might need something like that. Odd, but true; it's just the way I am.

When it comes to photography, I keep nearly all of my photos, even some of the more obvious bloopers, if they look kind of cool in the back of the camera or look like they might be salvageable in post-processing. When I recently overexposed a macro shot of a dahlia flower and made it bright white, instead of pale yellow, it was a hit with many of my Facebook followers. I took just one shot of the flower before I realized I had literally "blown it" with a high ISO setting (from the previous night's photography session). But I'm glad I didn't delete it in-camera, because it turned out rather cool and abstract, despite my mistake.

Another reason to keep some images that other photographers would delete is that either new software is developed that can be used to enhance the images, or new editing skills give me reasons to go back to older, earlier images and experiment with them. I did this with a picture I took of a barge on the Ohio River three years ago. The image was shot with an aperture of f/4.5, which made the depth of field too shallow for the distance the barge was from me. But the composition of the shot was still good and I was able to take that image and turn it into a watercolor painting in Photoshop, where super sharp focus wasn't necessary for a soft, muted effect in the image.

With storage getting cheaper and software getting better, it behooves a photographer to keep some of their borderline images, if they enjoy revisiting them in the future and applying new editing skills to those images. I don't regret keeping my "bloopers" and not-so-perfect images. I feel they will have a place in one of my galleries someday. They might be just the artwork someone is looking to buy for their wall.

Cheers!

Andrea Kappler