Sorting through the clutter. Advice please

Raptor Mike

Raptor Mike

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Mike
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I am just sorting through the banger racing photos I took and it's taking an age. I took just over 400 and I'm trying to whittle them down. I have removed images with stuff in the way of the subject by using the thumbnails but now I'm onto the out of focus stuff so need to be able to see a larger photo. I am using the organizer part of Elements 9 and RAWs take ages so load, and my PC is a goodun. I am becoming a bit of a hoarder because I don't want to bin photos I might want in the future and I hate sorting through the rubbish.

So my questions are:
What are your methods for removing unwanted photos?
Once you have all the sharp ones do you keep them? If not how do you decided what to bin?
If you're using high speed continuous how do you keep the count down in the first place?

Thank in advance, Mike
 
Obvious duffers get deleted on camera if I have time.
I use Lightroom and sometimes continuous shooting. When importing I won't even bother importing a string of duffers.
If I have a string of decent, but very similar shots I'll just keep the best one or two and not import the rest.
If I'm struggling to pick between some similar shots, I'll import both/all and look at them 1:1 zoom and keep the sharpest.
You can resize the thumbnails in Lightroom to suit- so I can do most of my filtering at that stage.
I then stick the card back in the camera and format it. If I do forget to do that, Lightroom is clever enough to recognise images you've already uploaded and filter them out.
 
I shoot automotive, and there's often a lot of action with slow shutters speeds in burst mode - and consequently lots of duplicates and blurred shots. I use faststone imageviewer to make the initial cull & edit selection before importing to Lightroom, and once I have the sharps I'm happy with I'll remove anything that's either not 100% perfect or eliminate those which are similar leaving the best one from a series. Keeping count down in the first place is a case of being disciplined and not sitting there firing till the buffer is full, I tend to shoot in 5-6 frame bursts halfway through my pan, or once I'm stable if shooting from a moving platform; over time you get to know when it 'feels' like you've got the shot.
 
I normally give it a 5 second rule, if i takes me longer than that to decide if it's a keeper or not then it gets deleted.
Without trying to sound like a smart arse you could spend a little more time thinking about your shots before hand :thinking:
Lightroom is great for going through and rating shots.
 
I use the star rating on elements but it takes soooo long to view raws, even with 12 gig of ram and an i5 proccesor. it must take 3 times longer than if they were just JPEGS. The 5 second rule is a good idea to get rid of the unsures. Good one.
 
Mostly in camera deletes if it's completely unusable. Once it's on the computer, it pretty much stays indefinitely. HDD space is cheap enough to leave it all there and not worry about running out. You never know when you might look back and think actually I can use xyz image.
 
Raptor Mike said:
I use the star rating on elements but it takes soooo long to view raws, even with 12 gig of ram and an i5 proccesor. it must take 3 times longer than if they were just JPEGS. The 5 second rule is a good idea to get rid of the unsures. Good one.
Click to expand...

This is why Photomechanic blows LR out of the water for culling. Not only do you not need to ingest and render previews, the full screen browsing even on my elderly laptop is actually instant.

As for a 5 second rule....I timed my culling once and it's around 40 a minute ;)
 
When shooting sports I go with locking the images that instantly stand out as the keepers, import / ingest and edit just those, then look through the remaining photos and just pick any stand out ones you may have missed. Don't get overly concerned with binning rubbish, you'll develop a much faster workload if you just focus on the standout shots.
 
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