Help me! I have 250,000 photos!

Once in a while, I lack ideas for my blog. Today was one of those times so I headed over to one of those iniquitous photo forums to read what kind of assinine drivel was being published. Seriously, if those people realised how easy it was to trace them from their postings then I'm sure they'd be unhappy. It's as bad as Facebook - if people all realised that the asinine drivel they post can be seen by their employers, I'm sure they'd say something like "so what". The problem is that the "so what" attitude that is very prevalent is the undoing of so many people. It's as though there's a mental block that people have - they cannot see that what they post online can be read by people that might be able to make their lives difficult in real life.

So, today somebody posted they had 250,000 photos and had taken them all over the last 4 years. I though I was bad with about 20,000 photos. The problem is that because digital means that photos now do not have an individual cost, people just aim their cameras and keep shooting in the hope of getting a good photo. They don't realise that 20 very similar photos of a grapefruit just aren't that exciting and will never be worth any money whatsoever. The media is full of garbage about people selling photos for lots of money. Fact is - nobody can be bothered to disprove garbage like that. It gets posted, reposted and becomes yet another internet "fact".

Film because of its cost makes judgement more important. People will look at a scene and ask "is this worth photographing" and they'll ask "can I just buy a postcard instead". Because people took fewer photos, they took more considered photos. The photo albums of old had mainly photos of family. Vacation photos were of important and intreaguing things, not a blow-by-blow photograph of everything. Nobody wants to see your breakfast - not even you. Nobody wants to see your hotel room - not even you. Nobody wants to see what your holiday conquests look like - not even you.

Let's just face it - if you take too many photos then it'll just be so much of a nuisance to look through and you'll end up just forgetting about the interesting ones. To resolve this, apply two simple rules to all you photography.
1. Never take more than 1 photo of a subject - if the subject is badly posed or bad, it'll be the same in every repeat photo.
2. Limit yourself to only photos that are worth taking. 

Today I have taken 4 photographs and I used my cellphone for those. They simply illustrate what's happening on my bus conversion blog. I have not taken photographs with a DSLR on continuous of any of my subjects. To be blunt - who wants to see a million images of a piece of steel I just welded? Over the last week have taken no photographs.

Which do you prefer to see? 

I'd bet you prefer the carefully framed photo on the right - taken in Vilnius, Lithuania. The photo on the left looks more like Facebook garbage.

Going forward, I'd like my readers to take fewer but better photos. Be the curator of interesting images rather than the hoarder of every image.