A number of photography sites and blogs have spoke about staying away from the delete button, so I thought I would weigh in with my own experiences in resisting the urge to free up storage space. Digital photography has a great many advantages, but the ability to review and delete your photos on the spot is too tempting and often harfmul. The picture above was a complete mistake and I was very much unimpressed with it upon immediate review. Looking back, I am glad I kept the shot.

The shot you see above happened in an instant. I was walking around New York’s Chinatown with my camera that night — I had just stepped out of a Starbucks on Canal Street and was waiting to cross the street when I heard the unmistakable sound of a sports car engine. As this Ferrari ripped around the corner I quickly shot a series of frames with all the wrong settings. I had been shooting mostly stationary subjects all night and the camera was in a semi-automatic mode that was unable to give me anything close to a motion-stopping shutter speed at that time of night.When the car was gone I hit the review button and was thoroughly disappointed with every frame. I dismissed them all and moved on, but resisted the urge to delete the files.

When I got around to processing my pictures from that night, I completely changed my mind about this photo. Upon closer inspection I realized that I very much liked everything about it — there’s the quintessential “sports car red”, the obscured but thoroughly recognizable yellow Ferrari badge and the anonymous driver’s hand on the wheel. And best of all, there’s the blur. This car was flying, entirely too fast for me to capture a sharp picture, and the blurriness of the picture says just that. The title for this photo was a no-brainer: “Too Fast for Me”. This shot could only have been better if I had made it on purpose.

Digital cameras make it very easy to review and manage our shots in-camera. Many times we are tempted to delete the missed shots to free up space for more frames, but we forget that the LCD screen on most camera bodies is entirely inadequate to properly review a picture. So keep your finger off that delete button.