Editing Your Photos
The 3 largest photo websites are:
- Flickr
- Photobucket
People are uploading their photos on websites at a record pace. The current estimate is around a billion photos uploaded per month. A billion photos, give or take a few millions photos, per month.
- What's the quality of these photos?
- How many of these photos are in focus?
- How many of these photos are interesting photos?
- How many of these photos have meaning?
What happened to editing and deleting the "less than good" photos? My experience is the more professional the photographer, the better the editing.
A friend of mine mentioned that for a National Geographic article, they take between 20,000 and 30,000 photos per article and will publish between 15 and 20 photos per article. And these photographers are among the best photographers in the world!
With today's DSLR, large flash cards, taking a thousand photos is not much of a stretch. Just keep your finger down on the "button" aka the shutter at 5 frames per second, 9 frames per second. The major difference between a "real photographer" and "Joe Public" is that the "real photographer" can see the potential of a photo, how it will be after editing and processing. Joe Public can't see your "raw photos" and imagine how the photo will look after editing and processing.
- I never show all of my photos to the customer.
- I always do a first pass editing by culling all the out of focus, not sharp and unflattering photos.
- I process the rest of the photos in Lightroom by simple cropping, straightening, and often applying the Auto processing.
- Depending on the customer, I will either export the selected photo to a slide show or I export the selected photo to another temporary catalog, just for display and to show the customer how I can "improve" their photos.