There were a few questions about the information in the last post ...  most revolved around two issues: why I shot so many images and why do I keep so many. 

The primary reason to take more than one shot of the same subject in rapid fire secession is that fine differences occur between frames in just hundreths of a second. Think of how many snapshots you've seen where the subjects eye are blinking! Even more difficult is catching just the right  moment in action shots ... birds flying, lions leaping on a wildebeeste, runner sliding into second base, etc.

The other question ... why do I keep so many ... has multiple answers:

• It costs lots of time and money (travel, lodging, equipment costs, etc) to capture those images. Why throw them away? 
• Sometimes a promising image has to wait for my skill, mental attitude, or better software to become the one I envisioned.
• Lastly, I don't know what the future will demand. Recently, a well know wine maker wanted to use some images I had taken 6 years earlier that had never seen the light of day. There is no way I could predict that. 

So keeping all those images is really just a hedge about the future.

A little Experiment

Wanting to test the hypothesis, I went back to a little ad hoc shoot of some sunflowers I came across in the middle  of the big city. Would there be images that I didn't see promise when I took them? Would my views now be different than the initial ones?

For starters, this first image is newly discovered amongst the originals.

This bee shot was one that I originally worked and I've made no  changes to it from its original post:

This bee image, too, was  in the original post but I "re-processed" it a bit ... the primary change was a little crop to make it visually pop a bit more!

Not this one! It is unchanged from the original posting:

However, this image was taken of the same flower at same time. It had never been processed until now. You can see I was playing with using the sun alongside the flower in both images when I took both shots. But now, I took an unexpected path and converted it to a black and white emphasizing the light from the sun!

And, then I went crazy! I took a close up of an image that had been worked before and started playing with changing nature's colors. I like it ... do you?  It's my psychedelic sunflower:

But still, the best is the best. My favorite of that shoot was and is this image:

So, over time some images hold up very well and others ... I go "what was I thinking?" And still others become a new discovery ... I like that!  In this instance, 3 of the 7 images are "new".

A Closing Thought

Photography is an activity that captures time albeit in very small increments. My camera shoots at ten frames per second so the time it took to shoot those 8000 images last year was roughly 800 seconds or just 13.3 minutes of my life in 2017 was spent capturing time!  

Ciao,

Adam