PP bottleneck: do you shoot faster than you PP?

I came back from 3 days in Izmir and Ephesus with 972 photographs, and I still had a few hundred to PP from Jerusalem, and from a jazz concert, and a dinner party, and ... I do enjoy the PP part, it's like re-visiting all those interesting places, but I don't seem to get enough time to PP all those photos. I definitely shoot faster than I PP. Does anyone share this problem?

Drives my wife crazy, "Where are all those pictures you took, why can't I get to them" Thanks for RAW + JPG!!!

No problem for me... If I take 100 photos, maybe ten are "keepers"! I'm not afraid to hit "Delete".

ChasP505 wrote in post #7915256
No problem for me... If I take 100 photos, maybe ten are "keepers"! I'm not afraid to hit "Delete".

But you still have to dig through them. I culled my 600 vacation shots down to 125-ish, but it took 2 weeks to find the time and go through them. Sometimes you don't decide an image is a keeper until you have tried to fix it, either.

I think for vacation shots, unless it is in very extreme lighting, I am going to just shoot jpeg. With good light, the RAW advantage is barely perceptible and the PP + conversion is time consuming.

tkbslc wrote in post #7915294
I think for vacation shots, unless it is in very extreme lighting, I am going to just shoot jpeg. With good light, the RAW advantage is barely perceptible and the PP + conversion is time consuming.

Careful!!! Just a couple days ago I got ganged up on because I suggested that some people can still find a legitimate reason to shoot JPG!

I cope with the post processing by being very self critical. Anything I have any doubts about is left. I've only got myself to please so the management policy meetings are quite short!

I can't PP 6.5 FPS.

Since switching to Lightroom in my workflow I can pound through pictures like never before. I'm able to keep up with my shooting for the most part.

Shoot People
Shoot JPG
Cull copiously
Process Minimally

Folks want to see images. I suppose if one is shooting advertising copy then there may be more PP involved, but I think most people over do it.

tkbslc wrote in post #7915294
But you still have to dig through them. I culled my 600 vacation shots down to 125-ish, but it took 2 weeks to find the time and go through them.

It should only take you about 45 minutes. And that is with looking at each one.

The hardest part of editing vacation/family pics is getting over our emotional connection with the image. And that is very hard to over come. We may love a picture because of what is in the image, not because it is a good image. You have to learn to see your work from a 3rd party perspective. Then it is very easy to drop the bad ones off. You dont have to delete them if you dont want to. Just at least sort them. OOF is OOF wether it is a shot of your kids or not. Bad exposure is bad exposure..... you get the idea. Keepers stand out when there is no emotional connection.

I've no problem keeping up with my own shots ...

But now the bosses at my workplace want me to PP company photos of project work. Prep them for printing and marketing. Edit for website presentation.

I'm thinking they need to pay me a different rate for production work at home, using my software and system. I charge them for prints of photos, but just to recover costs. The 13 x 19" photos must be worth more than the $10 they happily pay ...

To me it's pretty simple. It's like when you are shooting film, you can go to the 1 hour photo place and get 4x6s, or if you want the best you either pay more and work with a lab and wait, or you do it yourself.

People who honestly want no more than a digital one-hour-photo can shoot jpeg, and as long as they get the settings right for each scene and don't need to do any further processing then they have the shot -- no pp involved, they can be good for whatever use.

RAW is different because it requires some pp, but there are still ways to do things like batch processing with RAW. But any time with a computer will take longer than the second it takes to click off the shot, so no mystery there.

With me, as far as shooting time, there are two basic categories: one include things like sports/action and active bird/wildlife areas. I can quickly build up hundreds of shots over a brief period of time because I'm moving quickly from subject to subject and shooting in short bursts and sometimes tracking them and shooting from different positions. So, I come home with hundreds of shots, I do my best to batch them together where they are the same lighting, I'm using the same exposure, I want the same amounts of things like contrast and sharpening in mind, and bam -- all that's left is cropping considerations. If I'm moving quickly and the conditions of the shoot are right, that can actually be faster than waiting for the 1-hour photo, especially since you probably won't run hundreds of shots through one-hour-photo, and I don't have to leave the house to do it!

My other typical shooting style involves subjects that don't move, that require thought instead of speed to set up and finesse exposure and composition, to bracket aperture a lot of time, to try different angles and various other things. I'll get less shots than birding for sure, but probably more keepers per shot. It's likely to to take longer on a per-shot basis to pp, but I'm looking for results that could have the potential of large, high-quality prints, and the extra time is worth it.