Chip Away, Chip Away at the Stone

Picture: Neal Maloney, owner of Morro Bay Oyster Company, cleaning oysters at his schucking table on his barge in Morro Bay, California

Some of you may recognize the title of this post as belonging to an old Aerosmith song. With that chorus pounding in my head, this image and that song describes exactly how I feel these days as I try to catch up on a mountain of unedited photo shoots. This virtual mountain sitting on my hard drive includes several years worth of book project shoots, along with a bunch of odds n’ ends-type shoots. The latter usually isn’t too big a deal, but a number of the book shoots cover whole weeks or more, and contain anywhere from 2,000 – 4,000 RAW files.

Many of these shoots have been cherry-picked to show off and share a few favorites, or to include in book projects. The difference now is that I’m doing a deep edit, which means getting rid of all the out of focus frames, the ‘not-quite-up-to-professional-standards’ frames (read: just-plain-crappy-photos), and similar or bracket frames. The remainder will eventually get keyworded and distributed to my stock agents and added to my own image archive.

I must admit, before hitting that final DELETE & REMOVE FROM DISK button and erase up to 1,000 images at a time, I probably waste up to an hour triple and quadruple checking myself to make sure I’m not deleting a hidden gem. But in the end, it’s a delightfully cleansing act to watch that Hard Drive needle show more free space, while what remains in my image library is a much more tightly defined vision of how I saw the world. It’s like looking in the mirror after getting a shave and a haircut for the first time in a couple months. 🙂

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Image ID#: mro-2227