Rules that make photography easier for me
Feb. 7th, 2026 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight81. Don't be precious about photos.
2. If it's blurry and it's not required for ID or proof, delete.
3. If it's so similar to the previous photo as to be identical, then it doesn't matter which duplicate you delete. Delete either.
4. It's not analog photography, if you want more than one copy of the photo, cloning the entire photo is easy in Lightroom.
4.a. In bird photography you don't end up editing photos in an artistic way so you never end up cloning photos anyway.
5. Editing the same pose over and over is tiring. You just need one or maybe two.
6. No matter how much energy you pour into trying to save bad photos (too dark, grainy) there is a limit to how good they'll look. Set a reasonable standard and move on. Not everything can be saved.
7. Taking less photos in the field means less culling later, so be reasonably conservative in taking photos. I want to spend more time outside birding, and less time indoors editing.
8. It's better to have photos edited than to take 1,000 potentially good photos that never get uploaded or shared.
9. You never go back to old photos to re-edit them. Keeping the raw files is fine but seriously you never go back to re-edit.
10. Mental overwhelm is the surest way to giving up. If you've taken too many photos in one day that it feels daunting to go through all of them in one batch, divide them into folders by location. (You can always regroup them in a folder after). If that's still too much, halve or quarter or however much is required, into their own folders. (You can always regroup...) You must have achievable, reasonable intermediate goals to persist.
11. If it's sharp when it's cropped then it's sharp. Stop zooming to 300% and freaking out it's not sharp.
Round 1: cull any obviously bad photo - blurry without interest, too dark, obvious dupes, bird no longer in frame, accidental photos of the ground etc.
Round 2: delete dupes, this photo came earlier in the stream and was okay but I have better photos after and it's not showing any unique behaviour that I should keep
Round 3: pick out from the rest which I should spend time editing
I took probably several thousand photos last year and edited almost 700 of them, uploading them to ebird. I took my camera out 59 days. A lot of these rules really helped me, because editing photos takes a lot of decision making energy. I decided I needed to basically reduce the mental load with some rules instead of basically starting afresh with every single photo. Coming home from a week's trip with two thousand photos is both showing restraint on my part and also completely overwhelming, and also, I'm not cutting down my other hobbies to spend all my time in front of a screen!
This is the highest rated image I have on ebird last year:
Snow bunting :)
2. If it's blurry and it's not required for ID or proof, delete.
3. If it's so similar to the previous photo as to be identical, then it doesn't matter which duplicate you delete. Delete either.
4. It's not analog photography, if you want more than one copy of the photo, cloning the entire photo is easy in Lightroom.
4.a. In bird photography you don't end up editing photos in an artistic way so you never end up cloning photos anyway.
5. Editing the same pose over and over is tiring. You just need one or maybe two.
6. No matter how much energy you pour into trying to save bad photos (too dark, grainy) there is a limit to how good they'll look. Set a reasonable standard and move on. Not everything can be saved.
7. Taking less photos in the field means less culling later, so be reasonably conservative in taking photos. I want to spend more time outside birding, and less time indoors editing.
8. It's better to have photos edited than to take 1,000 potentially good photos that never get uploaded or shared.
9. You never go back to old photos to re-edit them. Keeping the raw files is fine but seriously you never go back to re-edit.
10. Mental overwhelm is the surest way to giving up. If you've taken too many photos in one day that it feels daunting to go through all of them in one batch, divide them into folders by location. (You can always regroup them in a folder after). If that's still too much, halve or quarter or however much is required, into their own folders. (You can always regroup...) You must have achievable, reasonable intermediate goals to persist.
11. If it's sharp when it's cropped then it's sharp. Stop zooming to 300% and freaking out it's not sharp.
Round 1: cull any obviously bad photo - blurry without interest, too dark, obvious dupes, bird no longer in frame, accidental photos of the ground etc.
Round 2: delete dupes, this photo came earlier in the stream and was okay but I have better photos after and it's not showing any unique behaviour that I should keep
Round 3: pick out from the rest which I should spend time editing
I took probably several thousand photos last year and edited almost 700 of them, uploading them to ebird. I took my camera out 59 days. A lot of these rules really helped me, because editing photos takes a lot of decision making energy. I decided I needed to basically reduce the mental load with some rules instead of basically starting afresh with every single photo. Coming home from a week's trip with two thousand photos is both showing restraint on my part and also completely overwhelming, and also, I'm not cutting down my other hobbies to spend all my time in front of a screen!
This is the highest rated image I have on ebird last year:
Snow bunting :)
no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2026 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2026 08:54 am (UTC)My sister and I have been trying to make similar-ish rules for ourselves when photographing miniature sets, because yeah, going through four zillion photos and then editing half of them is both daunting and exhausting. (And I'm the one who's supposed to do it. XD) I still don't know that we've succeeded in getting the numbers of photos we take down to anything reasonable (I gather this is kind of just how photography works, alas), but we're trying to be more conscious about how many photos we take, and trying to delete everything we don't love rather than keeping them all "just in case."
I think I would find taking fewer photos a lot harder in birding, though, where if your only shot or few shots turn out blurry, there's no second chance. I'd probably be thinking "the more pictures I take, the better the chances that at least one will be clear."