How to effectively prune your wildlife shots?

Marsu42

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Do you know a situation like the attached screenshot - you've got a screen full of rather (but not quite!) similar wildlife shots, are wondering however you'll be able to select just one?

I don't machinegun wildlife with 10+ fps, but I usually take more shots than strictly required esp. with f2.8 since my 6d's af system likes to screw up with these. Occasionally and miraculously, most of them are in focus, so I've got more than I bargained for. My steps are:

1. quickly check for total screw-ups in camera
2. with breeze browser: check composition and rate images
3. ditto: check good shots for pixel sharpness (using the embedded preview of the cr2)
4. in lightroom: check for duplicate or very similar shots, leave one of a series

I'd like to improve my speed for step 4, I need way too long for that because I cannot decide. Horse dreaming better than horse looking cute or horse looking interested? Harrrrrgggn....

How do you prune your wildlife series? Use an egg timer and force yourself to select one after the time is up? Stand up and view from a distance? Throw a dice? Ask your girlfriend/wife? ...?
 

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This is never an easy one, but here's my process, which is similar to yours:

1. Review all photos - using PhotoMechanic (any software will do) delete bad shots (blurry, clipped wings, etc.) and tag/rate all liked shots
2. Select similar shots - scroll through them and eliminate ones that are less sharp or aren't ideal (see below)
3. If more than one remain, zoom in at 100% to see if one is sharper
4. If more than one still remain, process them side-by-side, then review final TIFFs
5. If I still can't decide, give myself time to decide, or view them on my Plasma TV (I have it calibrated as well :)) Sometimes seeing the photo on something other than the monitor can help. I sometimes stand back and view my monitor from a distance (as you noted) with the photos playing as a slideshow.

On #2, I try to look for photos where the head angle is either staring at me or sideways between about 70-90 degrees off axis from the front. I also look for framing where the subject is looking outside the frame and try to have the subject on the opposite side of the frame. I look for sharp eyes, single subjects without OOF others in the frame, and try to exclude distracting elements such as leaves and branches. Other things are look for are emotion, unique behavior, eye contact, environmental setting and things like that.
 
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Marsu42

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mackguyver said:
I sometimes stand back and view my monitor from a distance (as you noted) with the photos playing as a slideshow.

I tried that (used to view only single shots from afar) - good advice, and it's easy to do with LR's built-in slideshow module. This way, minor difference are more visible than side by side in the loupe comparison.

The most frustrating thing about this is that I guess nearly no viewers appreciate how much freaking work goes into this stage, they think you go there and snap away. And it's true, you might get lucky sometimes, but not on the long run...
 
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Marsu42 said:
mackguyver said:
I sometimes stand back and view my monitor from a distance (as you noted) with the photos playing as a slideshow.

I tried that (used to view only single shots from afar) - good advice, and it's easy to do with LR's built-in slideshow module. This way, minor difference are more visible than side by side in the loupe comparison.

The most frustrating thing about this is that I guess nearly no viewers appreciate how much freaking work goes into this stage, they think you go there and snap away. And it's true, you might get lucky sometimes, but not on the long run...
Yes, people have no idea how much work truly goes into wildlife photography from the planning to the print stage.

Also, as I've shared with you in the past, if you think this is hard, wait until you have to decide which photos should go into a photo book. Narrowing down hundreds or thousands of "keepers" into a much smaller number is just painful and makes you reevaluate them all over again.
 
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BeenThere

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You guys :) :) :)
After going through the reviews you outlined, if multiples remain, just pick one (say the last one) if you are going to print or post. You then delete the others or move on and leave them for later ( you never come back). Storage is cheap. If there are thousands to go through, you want to get it done in one lifetime.
 
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Marsu42

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BeenThere said:
Storage is cheap. If there are thousands to go through, you want to get it done in one lifetime.

I already only review my good (rating >=3) keepers, and don't delete pruned keepers which makes it easier to dump one - because you *could* come back ... but in reality, you are correct, you don't. Which makes it even more tricky, because with very "difficult to get" or unique shots for me "just selecting one" simply isn't an option.

mackguyver said:
Also, as I've shared with you in the past, if you think this is hard, wait until you have to decide which photos should go into a photo book. Narrowing down hundreds or thousands of "keepers" into a much smaller number is just painful and makes you reevaluate them all over again.

That's the direction I'm indeed going in, but my experience still that is that I have to pre-prune the shots at least to the best selection of potential "single shot selections", eliminating near-dupes.

When I was new to digital photograpy, I used to shoot with the intention "I'll prune it later, in winter, or whenever" ending up with a huge amount of completely unselected shots. I managed to clear the backlog, but I feel the only way to prevent this from happening again is to (pre-)prune at the end of the same day.
 
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BeenThere said:
You guys :) :) :)
You then delete the others or move on and leave them for later ( you never come back).
I don't spend as much time as you'd think, but as for the never come back comment, I used to think that was true. Then I started selling my photos and started getting this kind of thing - Do you have that one in a vertical? I like that one, but do you have another angle? Can I get one with ____ (outside the frame, of course) in the shot? Do you have one where the _____ animal is [looking this direction, doing this or that]?

The rule is that the client always wants the shot you didn't take (for non-commissioned work).

After losing half a dozen sales, and exposure in a major magazine :'(, I started to appreciate the idea of taking additional shots when I find a good subject.
 
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Marsu42

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RLPhoto said:
I like how you use the Classic Theme for Windoze. :p

I used to use Aero for a long time, but as this uses the gpu (i.e. generates heat and eats power) I switched back to the good ol' Windows 2000 look :) ... it even saves a bit of vertical space on my very limited 1366x768 laptop screen.
 
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In a B&H video on photo editing work flow that I saw a while back the presenter suggested spending the absolute minimum time on rejects, one glance and move on, don't even bother rating them. Once you've viewed a set, delete everything not rated.

As I rarely shoot action, I rarely use burst. With adequate light I trust to my skills and the camera's capabilities to get a good shot, I do chimp a lot just to be sure.
With low light and slow shutter speeds I will shoot short bursts up to 4 or 5 frames assuming that there will be some camera movement as I press the shutter while hoping that I and the camera will be still during the duration of at least one frame.

Seriously, don't burst unless you really need to, trust to your judgement, skill set and gear.
When culling later, again, trust yourself, pick what first appeals, dump the rest.
If shooting for a client you'll want to cull looser so as to meet the client's specs with a few optional choices.
 
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Marsu42

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tolusina said:
With low light and slow shutter speeds I will shoot short bursts up to 4 or 5 frames assuming that there will be some camera movement as I press the shutter while hoping that I and the camera will be still during the duration of at least one frame.

I very seldom shoot burst as I'm using flash most of the time...

... but I do repeat shots a lot not only in case the af screwed up, but with horses there are a couple of things that change continuously: They keep moving their head and ears all the time and blink in an unpredictable way, so getting a keeper takes some attempts or I go "noooooooooo" afterwards. This keeper rate gets worse the more animals are involved at one time.

I'm looking forward to shooting frogs again in a few months, at least they sit motionless and give you time to frame and expose properly :p

tolusina said:
Seriously, don't burst unless you really need to, trust to your judgement, skill set and gear.

We're talking of the 6d's af system here...

tolusina said:
When culling later, again, trust yourself, pick what first appeals, dump the rest.

Hmmmyes, this is a problem - when looking at a series for a longer time I often find shots more appealing I though less of at first. The slideshow advice certainly was good to give my intuition a chance over pixel peeping.

I'm also getting better isolating the specifics I like so I'm at least getting faster. One problem is that I still tend to confuse a great situation with the pictures that resulted from it, and not all shots are stand-alone but need to embedded in a series or need a description. But I'm working on that, too :)
 
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tolusina said:
Marsu42 said:
....We're talking of the 6d's af system here......
Yup, using BBF.
Is the 6D AF that bad? I know there was some angry 4,000 page thread about it ;), but if it's as good as the Rebel's it can't be all bad. Center AF point focus & recompose with AI Servo always worked well for me (with BBF).
 
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mackguyver said:
Is the 6D AF that bad? I know there was some angry 4,000 page thread about it ;), but if it's as good as the Rebel's it can't be all bad.

No, the 6d/5d2 af is worse. Reasons are:

1. The recent Rebels have a dual-cross center point and the rest vanilla cross. The 6d/5d2 have horrible non-cross outer points, trying to af on a horse's fur is a bad joke and fails 90% of the time. The center point is "hybrid", meaning that if the f2.8 line misses it falls back to the f5.6 cross meaning a "micro-miss" which I frequently see on fur with my 100L wide open.

mackguyver said:
Is the 6D AF that bad? I know there was Center AF point focus & recompose with AI Servo always worked well for me (with BBF).

2. what makes this hybrid cross worse is that the dof on ff is thinner (given same framing yadayadayada), so with a f2.8 lens on the 6d you're at a dual disadvantage when using focus & recompose. With my 60d I felt the af system wasn't designed for tracking, but reliable. With the 6d I feel it's dodgy and I'd better at least double-take nice shots to be on the safe side.

I know lots of people feel the 6d is just fine, but today I took ~500 shots of a newborn wild pony and am just browsing through them, getting annoyed. I was rather excited which accounts for some af errors, I know the mares and the stallion but crawling around a horses' hooves is still adrenaline rush. But the keeper rate is really bad as even with a ~200mm f4 af focus & recompose with ff on something that moves is very difficult. And I have learned to only try the f2.8 100L when the pony is lying down and barely moves.
 
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Marsu42 said:
mackguyver said:
Is the 6D AF that bad? I know there was some angry 4,000 page thread about it ;), but if it's as good as the Rebel's it can't be all bad.

No, the 6d/5d2 af is worse. Reasons are:

1. The recent Rebels have a dual-cross center point and the rest vanilla cross. The 6d/5d2 have horrible non-cross outer points, trying to af on a horse's fur is a bad joke and fails 90% of the time. The center point is "hybrid", meaning that if the f2.8 line misses it falls back to the f5.6 cross meaning a "micro-miss" which I frequently see on fur with my 100L wide open.

mackguyver said:
Is the 6D AF that bad? I know there was Center AF point focus & recompose with AI Servo always worked well for me (with BBF).

2. what makes this hybrid cross worse is that the dof on ff is thinner (given same framing yadayadayada), so with a f2.8 lens on the 6d you're at a dual disadvantage when using focus & recompose. With my 60d I felt the af system wasn't designed for tracking, but reliable. With the 6d I feel it's dodgy and I'd better at least double-take nice shots to be on the safe side.

I know lots of people feel the 6d is just fine, but today I took ~500 shots of a newborn wild pony and am just browsing through them, getting annoyed. I was rather excited which accounts for some af errors, I know the mares and the stallion but crawling around a horses' hooves is still adrenaline rush. But the keeper rate is really bad as even with a ~200mm f4 af focus & recompose with ff on something that moves is very difficult. And I have learned to only try the f2.8 100L when the pony is lying down and barely moves.
That makes a lot of sense and I'm sorry it's so bad. I hope you were able to get a few sharp shots of the little guy/gal.
 
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Keith_Reeder

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BeenThere said:
and leave them for later ( you never come back).

"Never come back"?

I've lost count of the number of old files that I've returned to and converted/processed in a new converter, or in a new iteration of an existing converter - it's one of the joys of shooting Raw that you really can sometimes make a new silk purse out of an old sow's ear...
 
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Keith_Reeder said:
BeenThere said:
and leave them for later ( you never come back).

"Never come back"?

I've lost count of the number of old files that I've returned to and converted/processed in a new converter, or in a new iteration of an existing converter - it's one of the joys of shooting Raw that you really can sometimes make a new silk purse out of an old sow's ear...
Same here
 
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Dpp is pretty good for sorting and deleting. I just use it for that and find ver 3 to be much quicker than ver 4. It opens fast, use quick check, there is no lag between images. One finger on the arrow key one on the x (reject). Make one pass to x out the ones that look bad in normal view but don't get rid of clipped wing images etc. They may look good with a tight crop. Select reject images/delete. Make another pass at 50%, x out and delete the unsharp ones. Make.a third pass and try to pick out the ones you really like and star them by hitting #1 or #2 and delete the ones that are almost identical or close. You can whittle down 500-600 shots to 10 or 12 in about 15 minutes. I never go back and use those almost as good shots for anything.
 
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