I’ll regularly take pictures when I visit family or they visit us with my phone and I’ll send those to whoever, no problem. But when I take pictures with my camera, I want to edit them. I’m gonna colour correct, edit out undesirable little bits, crop it possibly, I’m gonna do shit to it before I want anyone to see it. But inevitably there’s always someone who asks to be sent the pictures and it’s always the same convo.

Them: can you send me those pictures you took?

Me: Sure! I’ll hopefully have them edited in the next few days and send them as soon as I’m done.

Them: oh that’s ok! I don’t need edited pictures. Just send me them now.

Me(in my head): OK. BUT I CARE. I DON’T WANT YOU POSTING MY UNEDITED PICTURES ALL OVER YOUR FACEBOOK AND TELLING EVERYONE THAT I TOOK THEM WHEN THEY’RE DARK AF OR JUST UNFINISHED BECAUSE THAT MAKES ME LOOK BAD. internally screaming

Me(out loud): yeah sure, as soon as I can. (Has no intention to actually send unedited pictures, I’ll just edit them and send them anyway)

Edit: to clarify, I shoot raw+jpeg and those jpeg are what I don’t want to give out. They are typically unsaturated, dark, and even slightly crooked. I will pull light out, colour-correct, and crop images as well as remove chromatic aberrations before I want them posted to social media or shared to other family members. Images taken on cameras to not look like pictures taken on phones. I do not share those jpeg files before editing. Not to mention they’re just very large.

And for more clarification on why I shoot in both jpeg abs raw, Honestly, I just like to have both just in case. I lived in Japan for a few years and got like gigs of amazing photos… and then windows 10 installed itself on my computer without permission and I lost about 95% of it.

Ever since I’m crazy over cautious.

Editor’s note: This post was also published here and the author wanted to stay under a pseudonym.