Images from the Id – What do you do with 100,000 images or What’s a Lightroom?

Years ago photography was quite different for me. First I was young I had very limited income. In fact when I first started with a camera I was earning $1.10 an hour and that was pretty good part time summer work. Kodachrome, my favorite, was a couple of bucks for 36 shots. I used to count images by the dollar. My how life has changed ( I wonder who was the first one to say that). Digital has been a revolution. In fact I will use another cliche. Join the parade or get out of the way. Yea, I know maybe two people who still use film and they can do fantastic work but us everyday people who don’t like to work to hard and are cheap, (translation- use or monetary funds on equipment not film), digital  is the only way. Another factor, the actual quality of the images has gone though the skylight because of the availability of “reasonable” software and images that cost zero to record. This then leads to the obvious result of “spray and pray” shooting. Many wildlife photographers, including yours truly, set their camera to the fast number of shots per second and spray away. To tell the truth, the reason is not to get a good quality image but to get the image at all. What I mean is, thanks to the new digital cameras, images have the correct exposure (to stop the motion), aperture (for the depth of field you want), and white balance (for the correct color rendition).  The challenge for the photographer is to get the “pose” or the “action”.

Last Friday, I went to a a local wetland/park looking for some wadding birds. The advantage of this locale is you can get close to feeding egrets and heron, not easy in Colorado. Not a wadder in sight but the resourceful shooter can usually come up with something. I got Western Painted Turtles.  I have two purposes with this example. First- get the pose, and second- to show that this was done by taking over 200 images, and that was on a bad day! More about the pose later. What do you do with 200 images? How do you cull the junk out? What is the easiest way to process them? Remember one of the disadvantages of raw images is that each must be individually processed. Adobe Lightroom organizes processes and much more. I would never be able to find let alone work on an image without it. I will keep coming back to this in other entries.

This week’s image: Western Painted Turtle “Saying Hello”: Not much was going on with the birds so we worked on the turtles. This is one of about 40 shots and the only one of any competitive value. If you take enough shots eventually you will see the pose you want – 1/350 sec, f/5.6, 0 EV, ISO 140, 400 mm/ 600 mm