Austin's new rules for personal photography.

I'm angry at my former self.


cutting down my photo library to "things that aren't awful" is taking WAY longer than it should, in no small part due to the fact that I've gotten a lot better at photography than I used to be. In other words, a lot of pictures that are in some way or another greatly flawed. So I'm setting forth some new rules for my own picture-taking-and-library-maintaing practices:

1. Go through and delete duplicates and unnecessary pictures from the rolls within a month of adding them. don't wait for them all to stack up.
2. If you're taking pictures of food, and there aren't any people in it, it better be some really interesting-looking culturally informative food. No pictures of the soup you ate. ever again.
3. if you stay in a hotel room, you get one picture of the room. one. find a way to fit the stuff in the frame. if the view is notable, that's your picture. bathrooms aren't worth remembering.
4. less is more. three thousand pictures aren't as good as twenty pictures. ever.
5. if the subject matter is important to you, but the picture didn't come out, delete it. tough cookies.
6. Just because you're ashamed of past haircuts and overall sense of style doesn't mean you get to delete every picture of yourself from 2004 to 2009. The past happened, and you need these pictures as a way of keeping you from regressing.
7. Don't be lazy. don't settle for the most convenient way of getting the shot possible. stop your car and get out and take a picture. don't upload pictures to facebook without cutting it down to the top roll or two of shots (I'm SO SORRY, Cape Town '09 team.)
8. When using a camera in a historical museum, don't use your camera in such a way that you attempt to replicate a walk through the museum, complete with every single title card and object. If you use a camera at all, stick to artistic shots and things you can't just look up on wikipedia.
9. If you're looking at a way to frame something, involving people in the subject and not trying to isolate something from its' environment nearly always makes a picture better. Capture moments, not things.
10. If, looking back at a picture from 5 years ago, you don't have any idea what is going on but you clearly did at the time and there's no way to jog your memory, delete it.
11. If you have a picture that encapsulates a friend looking particularly unphotogenic compared to normal, it doesn't matter what else is in the picture. delete it.

Meta-rule #1: You can make exceptions to the rules, but they have to be actual exceptions and not just a recursion to arbitrary decisionmaking.