The Stinkers and the Keepers

After a day of shooting, the fun really starts...the time
to decide what images to keep and what images to delete.

When that time has come I use two programs, both from the
company Breezesys. They are Downloader Pro and BreezeBrowswer.

When setup correctly, DownloaderPro will automatically copy
my images from the CF card to a directory. All I have to do
is specify a job code. The job code is my description of the
images I just shot. For example it might contain the date of
the shoot and the place. All of that information is then appended
to the actual file name.

Now it comes time to review, which I use BreezeBrowswer. This
app is great because it allows me to view the images in full
screen via slideshow while marking my favorites. At the end,
anything that isn't marked, gets deleted.

I perform a couple of rounds of culling. The first round I delete
the obvious out of focus shots. If the images aren't sharp now,
they're not going to be sharp later. The second round is where
I pay attention to the technical side. If the image has a bad
head turn, bad background...anything that I'm 100% positive I
can't fix in Photoshop gets trashed.

The final round is usually marking the images that I think are
the best of the best. These will be the ones I'll give the most
attention to since they could end up in a frame or something.
The second best images if you will, are my backups, to be used
when I might need more down the road.

If I'm lucky, I'll have around 80-100 keepers out of a couple
hundred that were deleted. Now you hopefully understand better,
hopefully, why I'm so picky in the field (from my earlier blog).
I don't know about you, but I'd rather go thru 300 or 400 images
vs 1000-1500 images. Yikes!

After all of that I then move my remaining images to their own
directory. Me, I have a folder for each place I've visited. Then
that folder is broken down by year, then by RAW, TIF and JPG folders.

I know it might be hard to delete an image, especially if you've fallen
in love with the species. But this is where you have to separate yourself
from the others. You have to remove emotion out of the equation. I'd
rather see one great bird photo vs 10 below par images.