This is a photo I took in Perugia, Italy in 2011 staring out the back of a mini-metro train. Sometimes a simple photo is the best photo.

Learn how to delete photos!

I remember when I first started out as a photographer. I had bought my friends Canon 30D and went on a photography spree. I took 422 photos over the next 24 hours, and then 394 the next day. I kept every single one of those photos, even to this day. That is a huge mistake, and I'll explain why soon but first let me indulge myself by thinking my opinion is important.

The art of deletion is a very difficult concept to grasp when you first start photographing, and sometimes forever, but it is something that must be done for your photos to hold meaning. Let me give you an example. Imagine you are looking at your friend's photos that he took of some flowers. He took 100 photos, and decided to show them all to you instead of deleting 98-99 of them and showing you just his best 1 or 2. As you look through the photos, you are initially very impressed, but by the 5th, 6th or 10th photo you start to get bored. There is only so many ways you can take a picture of a flower, but you still have to look at 90 odd more. Each additional photo you look at holds less meaning than the one just before it. 

It's a byproduct of human psychology. We get bored easily, we get overwhelmed by too much choice and thus desensitized. Each additional picture is making the reader less interested. But all photographers, when starting out take a lot of pictures (as we all do), but then posts them ALL to flickr, facebook or shows them to anybody who's half interested on the computer, how many times have your photographer friends done this to you? I did the same myself, but I slowly but surely learned (Thanks to Kenrockwell.com) that if I delete a huge chunk of my photos and whittle them down to just the best, those few photos will hold the collective emotional impact (and maybe even more) of all the previous. 

Routinely now, I take about 400 photos when I go out shooting for the day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I took 2400 photos recently in Santiago, but when I showed them on facebook, I only uploaded 40. Thats a 98.4% deletion rate. If you want people to care about your photo's, then you'll do similiar. 

Before digital, we had film. Film naturally lead to photographers selectively choosing the shots they took so as not to waste a roll, and even then, every photo was not a keeper. Now with digital, people take shots they would never otherwise take on the off chance it becomes a good photo. While this is fine, you just have to learn to delete the crappy ones later, which allows the gems among them to shine even brighter then they otherwise would have if lost in a gigantic album of similar looking shots.

Learn how to delete shots, showcase only your best photos and watch the emotional impact of your photo's grow. It's really that simple. 

The below shot is from my recent escapade to the coast of Tuscany. I took about 300 photos in the span of an hour, yet I deleted about 280 of them. Of the 20 that remain, I would only showcase maybe 5-7. Enjoy!

All photographers suffer from the problem of constantly searching out the perfect sunset. I think I can honestly say I will never find another sunset as beautiful as the one I experienced yesterday, on the coast of Tuscany. It was awe-inspiring to say the least.

I was running around like a rabid dog with my Nikon D700, Canon S95 and iPhone 4S. I snapped about 400 photos, and took 40 seconds worth of time lapse videos.

Below is my favourite shot of the bunch. You can download it here if you want, and below the photo is a short 60 second video of the 2 timelapse videos I got intertwined with some of my other shots which I will post later on.