How many to keep

[Nwcid]

Basically what the title says. How do you decide what pics to keep and how many?

I have really been growing in my photography the last year or so. I just started using Lightroom, and have gone to shooting fully in RAW.

On my previous trip I was shooting a D70 in RAW and with iPhoto I could do a couple easy adjustments and have decent pictures. On that trip I took about 2500 pics and kept about 800.

Now I am using a D90 and iPhoto was not cutting it. I switched to LR5 and it does wonderful things. I can now make decent-good pics from things that would have been trash before. Problem is time. I took roughly 3000 photos on our recent trip to Bonaire. So far I have tossed 1000 of those but that still leaves me with 2000 photos. With LR it takes me more time per photo then it did with iPhoto. Say it takes me an average of 1 min/photo that leaves me spending ~34 hours working on pics just from this trip.

One thing I have learned is the more I dive the less pics I take, well less different subjects. I have only been diving 2 years now. When we first started diving everything was new and exciting so I wanted to "record" it all. Now I find it easier to get rid of pics unless they are "great" shots if they are things I already have pics of.

So I am basically curious how others deal with this. On another thread I was reading the poster stated he took 10,000 shots on a trip.

 

[BoltSnap]

I delete the really horrible ones that have no hope (black, fish tail, etc.) but keep others. I work on the better ones that have good composition. I may not have enough time to work on all but I save the ones I don't work on them immediately for later when I am bored and sick of watching TV reruns

 

[00wabbit]

I turn caps lock on and star my images. 1 star is trash, 2 star is maybe keep, 3 star is "needs retouching", 4 star is finished retouching, 5 star is best of the best.
Turning on caps lock makes Lightroom auto advance to the next photo after setting the star. So basically on first input I am just hitting 1,2, or 3 on the photos to quick sort them and LR auto advances.


Then I can just filter for 1 stars and hit delete.

I try to limit the shots I take because it is just junk to sort later. I do bracket a lot so that I have the best exposure to work with.

 

[RVBldr]

I take a lot of kids sports pics, and during a typical football or lacrosse game, I might take 500-600 shots. After an initial several rounds of culling, I finally use LR5 on the ones I like and end up with about 80 shots if that. Unfortunately, about 300 are still left on the hard drive which really needs to be cleaned up. Normally I'll cull the shots straight off the camera that I can tell are dung (before even importing), then import and cull again before attempting to develop with LR5. This at least keeps some junk off the disk.

 

[bradells]

What I do (surface pics), using Lightroom, I go through the pics and start rating them.

I go through rating 1-5 in 5 steps.

1 - 3: no adjustments. Just go through your library, and start rating pics that are in focus, contain the subject, and only choose a few of similar pictures. You should spend 1-5s per pic.

repeat for 2, from the rated 1 pictures to narrow it down.

Repeat for 3 from the pics you rated a 2.

after this I start to do basic corrections: crop & exposure.

then I rate my 4's.

After this cull, I then do all the fancy stuff. Anything I export/publish then gets a 5 rating, and is the final image.


BRad

 

[Nwcid]

All great points. I have been getting rid of bad composition, blurry, mis-focused, ext pics right off the bat.

I have not been using the stars in LR yet. On the photos I like I take time to develop them, then tag them "green". On the ones I like but are not "easy to edit" I have been marking them as "yellow" to come back to. On the "bad" ones I just flag them rejected. I have been using LR less then a month and a week of that was on vacation.

I guess one of my issues is even some of the "not best" pics are still reminders of the trip(s) we took. I know keeping 800 pics for a week is crazy, but I think that is the bigger area of issues I am running into. We do lots of local "weekend" trips to places we go often. I have no problem shooting ~200-500 pics and coming back with less then 100 good ones. Maybe it is just a mind set for me. But if I keep up at this pace I will overload my computer

 

[Imla]

I turn caps lock on and star my images. 1 star is trash, 2 star is maybe keep, 3 star is "needs retouching", 4 star is finished retouching, 5 star is best of the best.
Turning on caps lock makes Lightroom auto advance to the next photo after setting the star. So basically on first input I am just hitting 1,2, or 3 on the photos to quick sort them and LR auto advances.


Then I can just filter for 1 stars and hit delete.

I try to limit the shots I take because it is just junk to sort later. I do bracket a lot so that I have the best exposure to work with.

Tip: If you press X instead of 1 for your deletes, you can do ctrl/cmd+backspace and delete them all in one go without having to filter and stuff afterwards. (The X adds a reject-flag status)

 

[supergaijin]

On a photo-specific dive I tend to only concentrate on a half-dozen subjects. I don't like my results from 'shooting from the hip'- I need too much time to set up shots.

I regularly purge my photos as well- having started relatively recently and experiencing the steep learning curve, a lot of older shots which I thought were reasonable, are now in the cyber-bin.

 

[cb5150]

When I stared taking underwater photos my camera rig grew as rapidly as the number of photos I shot. I would take hundreds on a single dive. I would immediately delete the out of focus and non-interesting shots and then whittle the rest down based on the need of post-production.

Then one day I realized I was spending more time taking photos than ACTUALLY ENJOYING THE DIVE.

I ditched my big rig for a simple point & shoot that I occasionally take along on dives in shallow, bright, clear water. I enjoy my diving sooooooo much more.

If I want pics of a dive, I simply reach out to one of my dive buddies and ask for copies of theirs.
But really, how many pics of a reef fish does a person really need?

 

[MaxBottomtime]

I take anywhere from 20-50 shots per dive if conditions are good. I cull them down to just the ones that represent what the dive site has to offer and use them for a dive report. Other than that I don't keep any photos. I'm my own worst critic. In more than ten years of U/W photography I haven't printed any of my photos.