Bonus points if you post some here too. I’ll work on doing better on that myself.
Former professional here: This is part of the process called “editing”.
Unfortunately it’s my least favorite part. It’s good motivation to take better photos in the first place though.
Same lol, this is part of why I switched careers (that, and being poor and without good health insurance sucks).
That’s why I was so happy when I could finally completely switch to digital photography.
I kinda feel like something is lost in digital, but the process of creating photos is objectively way easier, more forgiving with mistakes, and much faster. I still prefer digital lol
I tended to somehow lose way more photos with analogue. Having to deal with those damn negatives was a chore.
Now I can easily archive everything, deal with editing which was almost impossible before, unless you only did black and white. It’s so much better nowadays. The glass got better too. And of course we have phones to replace compact cameras.
I really don’t regret anything.
Same, it’s worth avoiding the hassle. Film was a pain in the ass to manage by comparison.
I call it culling, but I am also a lowley hobbiest :)
I know that I was pretty discouraged when I started out, especially once I started getting into things like panning with motorsports. Or when I started trying to chase bees for [email protected]. Or trying to get a “perfectly” timed batting photo when my kid started playing baseball. Or lowlight outdoor photography without flash. Or I’m sure many other examples, lol.
Related: what’s your culling workflow? Bonus points if it can sort by biggest face in the photo.
Professional, amateur, whatever, as long as you keep shooting and striving to improve. I’ve seen “pros” who couldn’t find their own asshole with a GPS and a team of proctologists and “amateurs” who consistently blew me away with incredible shots. Getting paid doesn’t necessarily mean you are a great photographer, it just means you made money.
These days, my process is open them in a file browser with large previews, then select what to crop/adjust, and save it to another folder for edits of that particular shoot after editing in GIMP.
Back in the day it was generally Adobe Bridge > Photoshop > send to fileshare > try to double check that copy desk did not fuck up the captions again after the files are updated (God damn it, they did almost every time and I may or may not have caught it in time) > Publication but each places kind of has their own work flow that they may or may not expect you to adhere to to varying degrees of faithfulness. Some places didn’t give a fuck as long as you got the final product in a usable format, others insisted you do it The Right Way™.
I will also leave you with this quote: “The surest way to ruin a hobby you love is to make it a profession.”
I think my problem is having a fast camera that can shoot fast bursts. 95% of my photos are people and I’ve really leaned into candids. I’ve also only ever shot digital, starting about 15 years ago. My arc has been
- “Say cheese” (posed)
- Huh, people blink. Let’s try a few shots just to be safe
- One shot candid
- Huh, people still blink when they’re being candid. Plus fleeting expressions are great. Let’s try a few more shots in sequence just to be safe
- Sports are fun!
- I didn’t get a photo of each kid on the team getting a hit
- I didn’t get a photo of each kid on the team getting a hit with the ball in the frame. Bonus points for the ball making contact with the bat
I left my last little league game with an obscene number of photos. The parents loved them, and I’m pretty decent at culling quickly, but the first step of sorting by faces to make sure each kid has a few decent photos takes a while.
I could easily see someone trying to replicate what I share getting discouraged, but they also will probably underestimate the effort to talent ratio going on behind the scenes. I like to think I’m not alone here, but maybe I’m just a spray and prayer suffering the consequences of my own actions.
Talk to them instead of trying to instruct them: Make jokes, carry on conversation, but keep shooting while you do it. It will look more natural and people will tend to look towards you when you converse with them. I’ve had the chance to talk to some world renown photographers and one of the best pieces of advice I got in regards to shooting portraits was, “Keep them talking, you’ll end up with something good.”
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This is a good idea! My main subjects are my kids and I’m just trying to catch them doing everyday life things. Talking to them kind of feels like cheating and I worry it might ruin whatever they’re focused on doing, but it’s worth a shot.
Yikes, looks like my post got spammed when the server had some issues. Sorry about that.
Ah, I thought you were talking about portrait/group photos. Yeah, that’s a different story.
All good! I try to take photos of people doing people things, vs simply posing, which results in me leaning into burst photography. On one hand, I usually get a few good ones. On the other hand, so much culling.
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I get a RAW and a JPG of every photo I take, and I save every single one of them.
Sometimes I don’t look at a collection for years, and then when I do I find that a photo I thought was bad is in fact amazing.
I need to get a NAS to have a decent photo backup.
Right now everything is stored on a single hard drive…
At least grab a second drive and keep a copy, even if it’s external.
Some of my photos truly aren’t worth keeping, lol. I think the moral of the story is not to get discouraged if you don’t get 100% keepers every shot. People blink/move, you don’t always get the framing right, etc. It’s easy to look at the photos posted to social media and get discouraged. Don’t! For every photo you do see, there are tons and tons you don’t see.
