Photo tips for watery bloggers -- Don't bring out your dead

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No one wants to see all your outtakes...  No one.

So... You've been following along and decided to get out there and take a bunch of pix for your blog. Well? How many did you shoot? What's that you say -- five images? For the entire weekend? Phfft...

Back when I was shooting film for my own pleasure, I'd shoot five images per day and still have only one decent shot per roll of 36-frames... if I was lucky! And I shot very little back then (compared to now) because film and processing was so expensive. When I first began to see digital images get to the point that they looked good on an 8x10 print, that's when I bought my first digital camera and discovered the problem with excess digital images.

Decades ago -- when I was in the multi-image industry -- we would go out on location and shoot dozens of rolls of film and process them as soon as we got back into the studio. As I recall, the most we ever shot in one day with two photographers and several Nikon F3 bodies was roughly 30 rolls of E-6 slide film, which then took most of a day to process and another day or so to cull.

Cull? Yes, cull. Sorting the enormous number of raw images into a pile of keepers and a pile of throwaways. And we had to be ruthless about culling and do it several times. So we're talking about four to five man-days (or more) of effort to shoot, process and cull about 1,000 images.I shoot 1,100 images in just a few hours by myself now -- and I download, post-process and cull them in less than a day.

My most recent big shoot was for the Star-Spangled Sailabration post of last Sunday. We arrived in Baltimore on the prior Thursday morning and I shot photos off and on throughout the day while we were wandering in and around the Inner Harbor. When we returned home I had 1,128 shots to go through and cull (keep in mind that I bracket everything with three exposures, so that brought the total count down to 370+ image sets to wade through). By the time I was finished, I had just 58 individual images that I considered decent enough to share on the blog. And of those, maybe just five or six that I'd consider good enough for a work portfolio, and maybe just the following three for my own cream-of-the-crop portfolio (still not sure about the top image).





The point I'm trying to make is that selecting photographs to share is very subjective.  And to do it right I try all sorts of tricks:

• For the first pass at culling them, I look for proper exposure and sharpness.  Since each shot has a bracket of three to choose from, two of them have to go.  This step automatically culls two-thirds of all the images in one fell swoop.

• For the second pass, I look for duplicates (or near duplicates) and keep only the better of them.

• For the third pass, I look for images that tell the story I want to share.

• For the fourth pass, I begin to really dig for good composition and content.  During this pass I'm looking for images that'll survive the post-processing edit that's yet to come.

• For the Nth pass(es), I keep going until I feel that anything less will detract from the series.

By this time I normally have just a small fraction of the images I started out with.  On occasion, there won't be any left -- the entire shoot will have been a bust.  The most recent bust for me was this past Father's Day; we had gone to Annapolis to visit with Cindy's parents and I was able to squeeze in a short visit to the replica of the HMS Bounty that was berthed at the City Docks as part of the Star-Spangled Sailabration (Annapolis was to be the co-host of the event when planners had expected a much higher turn-out of participating vessels).  Unfortunately for me, I didn't bring my wide-angle zoom; I just brought the 50mm prime and it proved to have too narrow a field of view for proper shots of the Bounty.

Once I have the culling completed, I then turn my attention to post-processing.