In the spirit of making the photos available online almost immediately, Armando and I decided to upload some of the photos to Flickr during the halftime of yesterday’s Whitecaps game, s that they would be available to the media coordinator. During the first half of the game, I shot approximately 1600 images. I took about 9 minutes to import them to Lightroom
on a Macbook Pro using a Lexar USB 3.0 card reader
. Since I only wanted to select 3 or 4 best images, theoretically, there was more than enough time to select and post them in the remaining 6 minutes of the halftime. However, I found that changing my habitual workflow of culling, or selecting the best images, was not easy. My usual “shotgun” approach is to go through all images in the gallery mode and give one star rating to those that appear to be interesting and technically acceptable (sharp and reasonably exposed). The problem is that what I deem interesting results in about 10% of all images, which means that I would need to look through them again (and sometimes a third time) to further down-select to a set of not merely “interesting” but hopefully unique and generally the best. Clearly, this two- or three-stage process is not time efficient when only 3 images are needed to begin with. The only logical conclusion is the one needs to relax the quality of the selection process, i.e. accept the fact that the selected 3 images (which, by the way, must be determined in a single pass) might not be the best of the entire set. Basically, the timing of delivery of the images must take priority over the quality of the delivered photos. This is difficult to come to terms with, because from the artistic standpoint, we are emotionally attached to the photos we’ve just taken and intuitively want to show off the best of them. Here, the professional side of being a photographer must come into play. What helps me rationalize the process is that I know that the “best” images are still there, waiting in the Lightroom catalogue, which I will have other opportunities to review, hopefully, without the time pressure.
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