Rules that make photography easier for me

[silverflight8]

1. 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 :)

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

Oh, lovely photograph; what a beautiful little snow bunting!

[silverflight8]

Thank you, they're such cuties!

[grayswandir]

That's a beautiful photo -- I'm not surprised it's highly rated!

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."

[silverflight8]

Ty!

OMG I can imagine. With digital photography you're just limited by card size and that's very large indeed. (I don't know how people photographed birds and wildlife with film.) But yeah...I'm trying to get rid of the 'just in case' because it was just too much!

Hahaha I am usually on the "keep taking shots as long as the shutter is pressed" but try to be conservative about when I use it - usually only when they're flying. If the bird is sitting I'll try to just be careful. It's definitely true you'll have more keepers if you have more photos, but if I go too far I know I'll just get overwhelmed!

[spiralsheep]

3 is hard though! 10 is excellent advice that I should repeat to myself often, thank you. And, yes, as you say I too like going outside and looking at wildlife and plants, not sitting glued to a device.

Lovely Snow Bunting. We get occasional visitors up top around here most winters as they migrate (and then the migratory birders following the Buntings, lol).

[silverflight8]

haha I feel like I've gotten to the point where if my eyes can't distinguish, then for the purposes of viewing enjoyment, it doesn't matter (this is also how I feel about the increasing intricacies of TVs, monitor quality specs).

Haha the keen birder entourage!

[spiralsheep]

True about the monitors.

I don't know why rare migratory birbs bother to fly anywhere. They could just hitch a ride with the birders, who would probably feed them along the way too. ;-)

[silverflight8]

Right? Save energy and time probably!

[spiralsheep]

Birders could call their service Swift Taxis. ;-)

[silverflight8]

hahaha

[ambyr]

Editing photos is hard! I take so many photos in my day-to-day life, and there's years when I'm good at cleaning them up, and years when I'm . . . not.

[silverflight8]

Whoops, yeah. On vacation especially I'll try to cull photos daily (at least the ones on my phone) just so it stays a reasonable task.

[bluegansey]

Oh, that's a lovely shot! Beautiful bird!

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.

This is so true. I'm not a photographer, but I've kept basically every PSD file for every tumblr edit I've ever done (a lot of them on an old laptop, but I do remember saving them all, haha) and I don't go back to them! I just don't! (I guess I was very glad I did that recently, because I realized I'd cropped the screencaps to the wrong width and had to get the original caps and the editing layers I'd done and do it again, but I think that's actually the only time I've ever gone back to a PSD when I was "done" with an edit in about eleven years of doing these kinds of edits.)

[silverflight8]

Thank you! They're so cute!

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't go back to re-edit. Usually if I do it once, I'm done. And since it's an amateur thing, I'm not like a designer who has to produce them in all these different crop sizes but identical images, either. Once in 11 years sounds about my rate, too!

[pauraque]

Precious Snow Bunting! 🤩

[silverflight8]

They're such cute lil babies!

[queenlua]

oh my gosh, that snow bunting photo is LOVELY. (and i'm so jealous of the find; it's been years and years since i've seen one of those adorable lil guys~)

[silverflight8]

They're just so cute! But sadly in the winter when they come down south they seem to like the coldest, rockiest, most barren land, haha