Removing the Evidence

I spent several hours photographing the Fontenelle Forest wetlands this morning.  I ended up with over 600 images on my card. I never had this problem in the days of film.  600 images was 24 rolls of film and hundred of pre-Obama dollars.  

That was then and this is now.  My camera can take 600 images in 60 seconds provided that there is time for the buffer to clear between bursts.  I usually have the camera in high speed mode and try to take the photos in short bursts.  Today I took quite a few pictures of a raccoon looking for food at the side of the pond, a blue heron fishing and goldfinches plucking thistles.  

My first shots of the racoon were at 1/13 of a second.  I shot plenty of extra shots because I knew that 1/13 second wasn't going to stop any movement.  Ever after I had more light, my subjects moved fast and randomly,  This is a problem because I don't want 600 images.  I would be happier with the best ten or twelve.  I need to toss 588 images before I can put the best dozen into Lightroom.

I could easily spend all day picking the best but I want to spend as littile time in front of the computer as possible.  I certainly don't want to spend a lot of time on photos that I'll discard anyway.

Step One - Delete all the God-Awful images.  The cardinal in the image below is not looking at the camera.  Aside from this blog, I'll never use this image.  I use the Slideshow feature of Breezebrowser set to advance to the next image as soon as I have ranked the current image.  I rank pass/fail.  I can view 600 images and rank pass/fail in 5 minutes.  It varies, but I can usually cull 1/3 of the images in this step.

Step Two - Pick the sharpest images from each sequence  Remove the others.

I use Breezebrower to view thumbnails of my session.  

I took a two shot burst of this sunflower.  My shutter-speed was 1/23 @ f13.  At 1120mm, the depth of field is very shallow. The lens is image stabilized and mounted on a sturdy tripod.  The images are exact duplicates of each other.   I don't need two copies in Lightroom so I compare them in Breezebrowser.

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The compare mode in Breezebrowser allows me to look at the place where I expect the image to be sharpest and compare the exact same place in the second image.  The comparison in Breezebrowser fills my entire screen.

The images below show the difference at full resolution.  Notice the white speck in the middle of the left half of the center of the flower.  On the bottom images, it is shown twice.  There was more movement during the second exposure than during the first.  The rows of seeds look sharper on top as well.

 

Depending of the subject matter, I can usually eliminate 3/4 of the remaining images in Step 2.  

I begin Step three by copying all the remaining images to a directory that I load into Lightroom.  I make a few adjustment in Lightroom for exposure, contrast, color temperature and composition.  I remove any images that do not respond well to the adjustments.  If I have several similar images, I try to eliminate the weakest examples. 

At the end of Step 3, I may be down to a dozen images or I could have fifty,  In either case, I've eliminated any evidence of "spraying and praying".