Leslie Nicole

I’ve read a number of posts online where photographers advocate only saving your best work. Now, I can understand where the sentiment comes from. By only saving our best images, we can easily find our best without wading through the rejects. It also makes us feel better about our work when we only see our finest. Besides, it also saves on storage space. This all makes sense, but I say: it depends on how you work.

I have several reasons for saving photographs that aren’t my best:

1. Memories: Some of my best snapshots for memories are not great, technically. The photo of my dog curled up in a funny position in an armchair, asleep, tongue hanging out — taken with a flash and a compact camera that I grabbed as I walked through the room.
2. Information: Sometimes, a photograph doesn’t have a lot going for it artistically but it fits the bill if someone needs it for information. I recently had a request from someone writing a paper comparing variations of a dog breed. I had some photographs in my library that fit his needs perfectly, but they weren’t images I would have considered “picks”.
3. Stock Parts: If you do any digital imaging, you just might find that you have a great supply of “stock parts” in your reject prints. Maybe a Landscape is rather boring, but it has a great sky.
4. Rediscovering potential: Finally, I often go back and look at a series of photographs and discover that an image that I initially dismissed is actually quite interesting. I was photographing my dogs running in a field a few months ago. In one frame, I only caught half of one of the dogs, so I dismissed it as a reject —but didn’t trash it. Recently, when reviewing the photographs, I realized that both dogs were caught in exactly the same stride, same angle. Almost like I had cloned one. Having one dog cut off out of the frame actually added interest and movement to the photograph.

Now, I’m not suggesting you keep everything you shoot. Obviously that shot of your foot that was fired accidentally is due for the trash. (Although who knows? Conceptual art?) Also frames that are way too under or over exposed. When photographing still lifes, I’ll often take 5 or more frames of the same set up with different exposures / focus. I’ll go through and select a couple of the best to keep.

The above example of my Poppy Botanical image is a good case where I’ve used a reject photograph to good advantage. The digital composition on the left is what I started with. An OK image, but it felt like it was missing something. In an ideal world, I would have noticed this right away and shot another version immediately. As it was, I was working on the digital image in October and the original was taken in May. I went back to my library in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and browsed the folder where the original was located. I had nothing usable in the studio shots, but just before I gathered that poppy to photograph indoors I had taken some quick snapshots, hand-held in the garden. I found a photograph of a similar poppy that by all rights I should have trashed. It’s boring, not sharp and not even a very good composition. (What was I thinking?)

"Reject" Image

I saw it’s possibilities for my uses and did a quick mask using the wand tool in Photoshop.

Poppy selected from background with Wand tool

I then placed this image into my main composition. I’ll admit I had to do some acrobatics to get it to work. I had to clean up the edges where it still had some of the dark background showing. I color corrected it to make it look as warm as the main flower. I had to carefully erase part of it to make it look as if it’s sitting behind the main flower. I subtly blended the edges and then I applied a slight Paint Daubs Artistic filter in Photoshop. The filter actually gave it a nice effect that both faded it and applied contrast where it needed it.

Detail of placed / enhanced poppy

In the end, I’m pretty happy with the improvement to the original composition. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

To see a larger view of the finished piece and / or to buy cards and artwork, click on the image below: