Quantity, Quality, & Presentation

My wife had a great question.

We shoot all these pictures, how in the world do we display all the stuff we shoot?

The thought I had is that our standards are too low.

For me that was a much bigger question when I shot digital. Still, even with film, not every shot is a keeper.

Given certain limits we all have, like wall space, how does everybody deal with and display all the fun stuff we keep creating.

No one does deal with it. Even or perhaps mainly pros can do this with their personal work.
I think it Friedlander or Frank that left literally thousand of rolls of undeveloped film when he died.

Friedlander is still alive as far as I know.

We deal with it by buying more storage boxes to hold them all. Most of my shots never go anywhere (even some I consider pretty good). I do rotate what's on the walls every so often, though.

It's an interesting question.

I've recently written a will but I couldn't get a handle on what I want to happen with my negatives, slides and even the digital files I have on my external hard drive.

It's not as it they have any intrinsic financial value - it just seems a shame, having travelled around the world and taken so many shots of the people and places to which we've travelled, to just bin it all when I 'pop my clogs'.

I post some of my digital stuff on my website and other photo forums / galleries and I've had a few prints made of some of my better work. However, much of my output sits gathering dust in my one-person image library, slide boxes and negative folders until I re-discover it and do something with it.

Yes to all the above! I suspect most of us display a fraction of even our good material. I ran out of wall space long ago, and even then I only have four of my own prints amongst other framable paintings, and items of interest. Getting work published is my answer. I consider that my efforts have not been in vain if they are published somewhere, so I like to get material in to print as often as possible even if it's not terribly rewarding financially.

Steve