Personal selection is an important factor when compiling a gallery of your work, especially when your aim is bird portraiture like I enjoy doing. While there are approximately 300 digiscoped images on
my website, a file scan of my archive will tally
over 10,000 bird pictures that I’ve taken over the past 4 years. I know what you’re thinking and, yeah, that’s a pretty embarrassing hit to miss ratio, isn’t it? Well, it’s not like the other 9,700 images are absolute disasters. In many cases I may have gotten 10...20 or more good shots of a bird but selected 1 or 2 to publish from that series. But if you’re wondering what some of the other outtakes are like, have a look:
I must have a few hundred of these...
Sometimes you’ll encounter a bird that’s just not having any of it…
Other times capturing an aggressive display can define a whole new perspective on a bird…yikes!
Those bizarre ruffled feather shots are always fun…
With digital photography you can delete the mistakes or undesired shots, but I like keeping them all. They can be fun when you capture interesting behavior, or in other cases they make excellent quiz pictures. So I encourage you to archive them all, but remember to backup your efforts and treasured work!
All images © 2005 Michael McDowell
