7000 and improving

I have had my camera for a little over two years now. In that time, despite going through periods of neglecting it, I have still managed to amass over 7,000 photos. This does not include pictures of family or anything. These are just my photographic dabblings. Many are attributable to my trial and error style of shooting (Take a picture, see that it didn't come out just right, adjust something, take another). And if I don't delete something right away, I don't delete it. Needless to say that my hard drive is already pretty full. So I have been working on the task of sorting, tagging and deleting (or rather setting aside to be deleted after I burn them to disk - just in case I change my mind) all 7,000 said photos. ...I'll be at this a while.

What is intriguing me while I go through this process is that it is very easy for me to see how my skills have improved. Especially when going through the photos from the first month or so after getting the camera. Of course the images were bound to improve as I got better at handling the camera's controls, but I also found that the pictures I liked and was proud of at the time, I now think are quite dull. I can't figure out why I liked some of them so much. Then there are others I didn't care about, but now, due to the fact that I am also getting better at photoshop, I can see potential in them that I didn't catch before. So I guess my biggest improvement is not so much technically (or not at all technically, truth be told) but rather in my artistic vision. And that makes me happy, because the primary reason I always liked photography was that I wanted to create art, but can't draw. It's nice to find that there is way, albeit entirely subjective, to measure my progress to this end. ...Now which of my current photos will I think are dull two years from now?... ~__^