Huh? ROI (Return On Investment) on the artist’s blog?
Oh yeah. Read on.
Certainly I’m not talking about picking appropriate funds or stocks, so my possessions can grow large and quickly.
For me the ROI measure has become extremely important as I progress as a photographer and/or a human being. There is less and less time to play, more responsibilities, more projects, more work and I seriously need to keep “all my bolts tight” if I want to enjoy spare time and have moments to breathe.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that three years ago, in June, I photographed every day. That’s 30 days. Every day I would upload to my computer anywhere between 20 and 300 photos. That’s an average of 4800 photos uploaded to the computer just that month.
Uploaded to my Little Computer. Then left on a backup drive. May be 10-30 of them I actually published. Everything else is just sitting there. Typically, out of those (on average) 160 photos a day, I’d say 5 were definite keepers (to show around and/or collect love in form of compliments or money) and may be 10-12 were “interesting” to me for one reason or another. The other 140+ photos-per-day were what they still are. Dead weight on my hard drives.
These days I don’t photograph every day. It definitely varies vastly and I cannot say such an estimate is absolutely legit, but let’s just imagine that I photograph may be 10 days a month for business, then (hopefully!!!) 10 days for pleasure (weekends, family, other expressions and random stuff by iPhone). The rest of the time I’m doing “business work”. Including time to power through all the photos I took. A typical day to photograph brings home anywhere between 300 – 2000 photos that need to be gone through, selections sent to post-production (or done by me) and anything else needs to be DELETED! Brutally.
YES!!!
ROI of the images that are left is so close to nothing, that they are definitely not worth keeping around. And it gets worse.
I used to be very sensitive to this kind of thing – DELETE MY PHOTOS?? OH NO!!! I’d have nothing to show for myself!! (ask me how I solved that last one 
it’s very easy)
That’s why I am still staring at the hard drives full of useless images I took over the years. And will probably be staring at them forever, because I wasn’t smart enough to listen to the pros when they were telling me to drop the dead weight.
I am smarter now.
Everything that gets uploaded goes through the following process:
- selections are being made and sent out
- post-processing done and work submitted
- selections of things that “interest” me in one way or another (usually simply by gut feeling, or funny in a way or anything else that strikes you) are made and put in a separate folder
- 3 months later everything unseparated gets ERASED. From my hard drive AND memory. I wish I had time to look through them again, but I typically never do, so – DELETE!
Now… can you hear this sound?
This is what peace and quiet sound like!! I feel easy, light, complete, my work is done, there is place and time to accept more work and I have nothing hanging over my shoulder (except for a ton of old photos on old hard drives, I don’t really know what to do with those, may be hire a photo editor and be done with it. I can reuse the hard drives!)
That said… everything in life should be that way. Organized. Otherwise nothing ever gets finished, things pile up and overwhelm you… and very shortly you notice that…
YOU ARE STUCK!
So, unstick yourself, let go of the past hanging over your shoulder (if you can).
Let’s look at some more fun photos together (below!) and have ourselves a lovely day.
If you are reading this (I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why I’m writing either), you might want to follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
Also, if you have something to say, please leave a comment, this is the only way for me to know that this blog is being appreciated (by anybody other than me), so please show your support and in return I will (I promise!) hug you virtually every time you do that.
“REFLECTIONS” – Part 1 (the rest will come out tomorrow, otherwise the post will be too long…):
Lambertsville NJ (reflection in the window, flipped horizontally)
New Hope NJ (reflection in the canal water, flipped horizontally AND vertically):
Lambertsville NJ (reflection in the canal water, nothing flipped here (that you should know of)):
Lambertsville NJ (reflection in the window blocks the letter N in NEAT and makes the furniture/decor shop into a place to EAT, but of course, nobody would know that, not even me, when I was taking this photo with “lensbaby freak”):
