There are many, many wonderful things about digital photography, but no-one would argue that it isn't terrifically easy to rack up a lot of files, very quickly, and pruning them down to some manageable number has been the number one difficulty for me.

This is why I have somewhere between one and two hundred thousand images files on my computer (aided, it must be admitted, by the wizard's buying me ever larger drives.) But now that I'm shooting 4000x6000 RAWs, I suspect even the multi-terabyte drives I have are soon not going to be able to keep up, so I've been trying to get any given photographic sessions down to, say, 3–5 images. Or even 10 or less.

Neighborhood irises.

This means being ruthless. Anything the slightest bit out of focus, out. Bad composition, too busy, doesn't capture the dream, the flowers are only slightly wilted (i.e., not enough to make it obvious that was what I was going for), out. —By that metric, the image above should've been deleted, but as I've a) gone to the trouble to crop & scale (and slightly lighten) I've left it, as a reward for the 10 or 15 others I did delete. Some all were of beautiful flowers, and some came very close to capturing what I was going for, but...

Probably the best of the lot. sony ILSCE-7c, tamron 70–180mm 29may2021, approx 08:45; 1/200s, f/2.8, ev -0.3, iso 125, 180mm focal lenghty WB daylight. Scaled, otherwise out of the box.

It does get easier. And once the images are gone, like other clutter, what you breathe is mostly a sigh of relief, not grief for what might-have-been.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.