I’ve had an opportunity by now to go through most of my pictures from my trip out west to Utah.  I’ve been through all but 3 days (which means I still have about 400 photos to go), and I’d say right now I’m deleting around 50% to 60% of them.  You might think that’s a high number, but honestly it’s nowhere close to where I need to be.  Many photographers say you should throw out over 90% of what you take.  I can’t quite get myself to do that yet.

Why?  Well, number one, I’m not good enough yet.  I think the eye to know what to keep and what to delete matures in step with your overall photography skills.  I still struggle with “that’s a decent image”, or “I might use that some day”.  Number two, it is hard for me to delete things that are the tangible output from these trips that I do.  After all, at the end of the day all you get are new skills, memories, and photos.  All of those are important, and nobody can take away the first two.  However, when I delete a photo, it’s gone forever.  It is still a struggle for me to mature from a snapshooter to a photographer.

The good news is I’m making progress!

I’m hoping to have a slideshow done of my trip in the next week or two.  I’m going to be limiting the slideshow to 15 to 20 images that I’ll showcase on the blog, some of which may be the ones I’ve already posted on here.  But, we’ll see.  I have a lot of deleting yet to do, and then comes the hardcore editing and selection of the best photos from the trip.

Here’s a picture to hold you over…This photo is a pictograph from a rock wall off the beaten path in the Marlboro region.  I played around with this in color for a while, and then decided this might make a nice black & white.  The B&W conversion is done using Nix Silver Efex Pro.