Don't Delete Photos - Better Photos... Now!

If you ever photograph in natural light or changing lighting conditions (think of a wedding where you can quickly move from shooting inside of a church to outside in the sun), you'll eventually get a good photo that is severely under or overexposed because you didn't change your camera settings quickly enough (you are shooting on manual, right?).  Don't delete that photo!  If you're shooting RAW, you'd be surprised at what you can do with a little post processing.

Of course, shooting a poorly exposed photo isn't the only issue you might have.  Maybe your subject moved and you got some motion blur.  Maybe your focus didn't lock where you expected and you got an out of focus photo.  Maybe a dog ran in front of the camera.  Maybe it was just a test photo.  All of these are very real possibilities and, although they might not have given you the image you were expecting, you might just be happy with the results anyway.

I've also heard stories that deleting photos in-camera can mess up the formatting on the card and, on rare occasions, corrupt other photos.  While the odds of this happening are pretty small (I don't personally know anyone this has ever happened to), if there's a chance it might happen at an important event like a wedding, it's probably not worth deleting a few photos just to free up a bit of extra space.

Here's an example of an overexposed photo before and after processing.

And a few more recent wedding photos that illustrate my point:

This was just a test photo before Payal's portrait.  She was talking to her brother when I took this.

Again, this was a test photo while the group was messing around.

Someone else's flash fired at the same time I took this photo.  For some this is a ruined photo, for others it's beautiful.

Read all of my DSLR tips here.