Bonus points if you post some here too. I'll work on doing better on that myself.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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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
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.
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.
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."