Sand and Snow,
Xiang Sha Wan, Inner Mongolia
It is said that 99.5% of everything is crud (or worse, if would rather go for the R rated version of the quote). I think that continues to be one of life’s immutable laws. Or at least one that is not really worth disproving. I say this because I read a lament current photo sharing sites seem to make the 99.5% figure seem much higher. That may be so because 99.5% of a large number is a lot more than 99.5% of a small number. There are so many more ways to capture an image (or what we fogeys used to quaintly call, “taking a picture”) and there are so many more people doing this it stands to reason that the 99.5% is now a huge number. That’s why we seem to see so many crummy photographs on image sharing sites. In the old days, we had the courtesy to not inflict 99.5% of our photos on an unsuspecting public. Instead, our innate sense of decency impelled us to keep 99.5% of our photographs in shoe boxes under the bed.
So this little rant got me thinking. When I turned fifty years old, I created the “Fifty Project,” which was my selection of the fifty best photographs I had made up to that point in my life. In selecting the images, I discovered that I had not made the requisite 10,000 negatives required by St. Ansel. I chose the fifty images from about 8,000 negatives. In my current Lightroom database, I have almost 6,000 images and may have that many more archived on external drives. You won’t see them because about 99.5% of the photographs I take are images not good enough to share with anyone – and I plan on keeping it that way.
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