Say No To Deletion
But there is something in it, particularly for photographers. Many times I have deleted images from the camera before transferring them to the computer and opening them up full.
I recently discovered a couple of images that I would have normally deleted - and thankfully didn’t. We were on holidays, and rather than fool around with the memory cards, I just transferred everything to the travel laptop and figured it would be easy enough to delete what I didn’t want later. The first image was one I expected to delete even before I took it - the circumstances for the shot weren’t good: dull, overcast day, and the light of evening was almost upon us. Standing in a park in downtown Cave Spring (Georgia) a large flock of birds suddenly lifted off from a distant tree and headed our way. Without having much time to change any camera settings I tried a panning shot…partly to show a friend. I expected the birds to be blurry as well as the background because there wasn’t enough light to use a fast enough shutter speed to stop the action, and obviously the height of the birds didn’t allow for flash. At any rate, I never use flash on wildlife.
The Autumnal Dance (birds in flight)
Later, as I was deleting images from the laptop I decided to open this and take a look - I’m not sure why, because normally I’d just have deleted it. As soon as it opened full size I was taken by it - it was different. The background branches and remaining leaves were completely blurred, sometimes to the point of just being lines, the birds wings were blurred - at times they seemed almost transparent, but some of the bird bodies were sharp. The combination of colour, motion and shape had an attractive abstract feel, so I kept it. The resulting image is a combination of three separate pieces: the bird photo (the major feature in the image), a photo of leaves on the ground under the tree, and a fractal (applied with a very subtle hand).
Autumn's Ending (autumn leaves_
The second image was one of leaves on the ground - it came about as an attempt to show my friend how to accomplish a “convergence” photo, though I knew the lens I had on the camera wasn’t capable of accomplishing this given the lighting, it was worth showing the mechanics of. The result of my shot was a rather overexposed image of the autumn leaves, but she managed a decent job with her lens. Opening my image I wondered if there was anything good that would come out of it - I liked the brown and orange tones. I applied a couple of editing techniques and came up with the second image - another which I decided I liked well enough to keep.
I guess the moral of this tale is simply - don’t delete your stuff without looking at them full size first. You never know what you may find.
