Editing

Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." There is a an equivalent saying for photographers. The difference between a good photographer and a great photographer is frequently editing.

I always tell my photography classes that there are two pieces of equipment that will actually make you a better photographer. One is a tripod and the other is a wastebasket.

If you can only afford one, pick the wastebasket.

Learning to edit is one of the most essential skills a photographer can learn. I think it's a skill unique to the medium. Painters may sketch but they don't paint 500 pictures and then choose one to show. Photographers on the other hand and particularly now in the digital age, may shoot thousands of images but, hopefully, only show a few.

Photographers are notoriously poor editors of their own work. This is understandable since every image we create is wonderful! (Sarcasm!)

Every photographer who wants to improve needs to have folks whose opinions they respect and are good enough friends that they will tell them when a photograph sucks. (Hopefully in a constructive manner.) They also need to develop sufficiently thick skin to take the criticism. Good criticism is one of the finest gifts a photographer can get.

One last comment about the wastebasket. Don't take throwing away your images literally. I only mean it figuratively in the sense of heavily and critically editing your work. The "Delete" button is the devil's playground and I guarantee that sometime in the future you will regret deleting some of your images. Storage is about $80/terabyte and will probably get less over time. Don't delete your images, store them.

And while we are at it, always shoot RAW if your camera permits. You can always convert to JPEG later but you can never recover what you have lost when you shoot in JPEG. Remember storage is cheap.