Catching Up with the Photography Life Team, ’24 Edition

One year ago, I decided to sit down with some of my fellow writers at Photography Life and talk a bit about photography. What about in 2024? This year, I definitely wanted to get hold of Spencer, Libor, and Nasim, and get them to reveal their secrets about how they approach photography!

Organizing and Backups

When I started out in photography, I didn’t pay much attention to deleting photos. But over time, I took more and more, and I realized I had to delete some. After all, over time, managing photos becomes more complex as you accumulate more. So my question for everyone for this topic was, how do you deal with deleting your photos?

Libor told me, “I lock usable photos and then delete all those that are not protected by the key symbol. Fortunately (or unfortunately?), due to more sophisticated equipment, there is less and less waste. All the more photos then go from the card to the SSD and then to home storage. As I write this, my 10TB drive is in the red. Inevitably, when I return from Ecuador, I will be buying more drives, as the volume of photos I bring back will be in the higher hundreds of GB at least. So there is a lot to improve about my relationship with the Delete key.”

That’s absolutely true! The better the autofocus gets, the more keepers you get. It’s pretty hard to delete photos when they’re decently composed and sharp. Perhaps the solution is to sort photos in the field? Libor said, “wildlife photography usually has a strange rhythm. Brief moments of frenetic activity are often replaced by several hours of starvation when nothing happens. Not to mention that, often, nothing happens at all, and any activity is just wishful thinking. I try to fill these moments of passive waiting by sorting photos. Of course, one eye and both ears are on guard to make sure I don’t miss anything in the meantime.”

Then I thought, what about Spencer, who mainly does landscape? Although landscape is a slower genre of photography, because he also uses so many cameras, I thought he would be familiar with the delete key… but, I got a major shock! He told me, “this might be different if I were a wildlife photographer or a sports photographer, but my approach to deleting photos is not to do it. I never delete my photos.”

What, never delete? He explains, “I’m partly influenced by the fact that, writing for Photography Life, there are times when I need to share “bad” example photos, or a “good photo versus bad variation” comparison. But it’s also because I like to look back and critique my bad photos, to see signs of improvement over the years, or to know what errors I make the most often. I learned this philosophy from a National Geographic photographer who I talked to more than 10 years ago and haven’t deleted a photo since then.”

That’s such a cool idea! I think there’s something to that, and it also fits Spencer’s very methodical personality.

Of course, when I read that he never deletes, I wondered, how does he store all his shots? He said, “My strategy for keeping all these photos is to use NAS storage that has 32 Terrabytes of constantly backed-up images. I only need this much storage because of making YouTube videos, but I definitely don’t need to worry about running out of space for still images! Organizing them is also the same as it’s been for about ten years. I store my photos in individual folders divided by year and month, and I do any further organization (like sorting my favorites, or gathering images for a particular Photography Life lens review) using Lightroom’s collections feature.”

Like Spencer, Nasim has also used a huge number of cameras. In fact, I went back to the earliest Photography Life articles and found one of Nasim’s articles on the D80 and D90. So how does Nasim handle all his photos?

Nasim said, “I tend to delete photos that are blurry, taken by mistake or are duplicates before I import them into Lightroom. However, even then I end up with thousands of photos I will probably never touch. My goal for this year (when I have time, of course) is to go through my older Lightroom catalogs and delete photos I will never use or process, as storage just keeps growing and growing, and my backups are larger than ever.”

So you see, different photographers have very different ways of managing photos suited to different personalities. As for my own approach, I tend to shoot sparingly and delete vigorously. In fact, I set myself a personal challenge: to accumulate at most 40GB of photos per year. This sort of strategy forces me to really figure out which ones are the best. Also, it means I can comfortably carry my entire collection with me anywhere on a tiny 4TB SSD.

Favorite Camera Gear?

Now, one question I still wanted to know was…what’s your favorite camera equipment?! Actually, all of my team members have shot on quite a few more cameras than I have, so I was quite curious to know. I’ll go in reverse order this time and start with Nasim. He said, “This one is tough, since I’ve shot with too many to keep track of. If I went back in time and chose a camera that I shot with the most and probably made the most money with, it would probably be between the Nikon D700 and Df.”

“Most recently, it has been the Nikon Zf – I bought a red one on the same day it was announced, and it is just a beautiful and versatile camera! For medium format, the Fuji GFX series are my favorite – the image quality and the lenses are just stunning. However, I’m likely going to sell off the MF system, since keeping multiple systems is cost prohibitive, especially in the long run…”

What about Spencer’s favourite camera? Before we find out what his favorite camera is, first check out what Spencer wrote in an article from 2016: “I certainly am not planning to swap my digital camera for a film setup.” So, what did Spencer tell me when I asked him about his favorite camera, eight years after he said that?

He said, “My all-time favorite camera is my Chamonix 8×10 film camera. I intend to use it as my main camera for the rest of my life, unless I break it, in which case I’ll buy another. My favorite digital camera is the Nikon Z8 (and DSLR the Nikon D850) – having used almost every full-frame digital camera and many APS-C cameras, those two cameras just do the best job of being very competent across all areas and “invisible” when using them. My favorite Nikon lenses are the AF-S 70-200mm f/4 on F-Mount and the Z 105mm f/2.8 MC on mirrorless.”

And of course, I wasn’t surprised what Libor told me. I guessed his answer: “I try not to be too sentimental about the equipment I use, but I can’t help myself. The pragmatic answer would be that my favorite camera is the best camera I’ve ever shot with. So probably the Z9. However, I’m more emotional than pragmatic, so the camera I’ve experienced the most with is closest to my heart. And that’s… You won’t be surprised, the D500.”

As for me, my favourite camera is still the D500. I was going to upgrade it to the Z8 a bit sooner, but I’m actually preparing to move countries, so it’s still my main camera. And with a shutter count of just under 35,500, I think it’s still got a bit of life in it to carry me through!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed learning a little more about some of the folks behind Photography Life. We’re excited to be one of the few photography websites still run by a group of professional photographers, and we’re always happy to answer any questions you might have. If there’s anything else you want to know, feel free to ask below!