> Hey, I closely resemble that remark. I suspect there are a few of my images
> that over time I _have_ put 50 hours into, if you count the printing.
I've got a couple pictures that fall pretty close to that. Most of my
AR pictures top out at 20 hours, though. But I'm not nearly as tightly
squeezed as you.
For Wedding/Event/Portrait photography, I think most of us target a
maximum of 2:1 shoot/backoffice time ratio. In reality, for a turn and
burn, we want to keep it to 1:1 at most. So, for every hour spent
shooting, we top out with two hours behind the computer. So, If I
intend on handing off 400 images to the client, I'll shoot 800-1200.
If that's over a five hour shoot, I need to keep my computer time
under 10 hours. Five if it's a digital file delivery. This means that
first pass editing has to be kept down to about 5 seconds per image.
I use a three pass system. First pass I mark everything that is
technically OK. Blurred, badly composed, coleslaw hanging from the
mouths, bad blinks, etc. are culled out at this point. Everything at
this point has a one star. (sometimes, if I've done really well, I'll
just group assign everything to one star and then demote the garbage).
For the second pass, I mark the best of any dupes. If I rattle off
three shots of something in hopes of getting one good one, I select
the good one here. These get two stars. If two or more are actually
good, just pick one of them.
For the third pass, I mark the best or keepers out of the scene. I
might change compositions and reshoot the same thing. In the third
pass, I keep only the best of them. They are the ones that get three
stars.
At this point, I'm pretty well done. I only have to fix a few of the
images and in reality, during the second and third passes, I'll
usually determine that editing a shot is usually not necessary as
there is an alternative shot that is just as good and doesn't need
work. During the third pass, you are essentially reshooting the event
all over again. It pained me for a long time to get rid of perfectly
good images, but if the image doesn't fit the storyline, or end use,
it's gone.
A variation, though, is to take your three star images and then put
together usage collections for the various clients. Once in a while,
you may have to dig back for a 2-star image to complete a set, but
that's not all that common. I personally don't keep the 0/1 star
images. As soon as I've done my client delivery, those are deleted. Or
at best, I'll keep the JPEGs but toss the RAW images.
AG
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
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