Culling

First let me say that I totally understand that culling photos is ultimately a personal decision. But since I've started shooting sports (roller derby to be precise) my total yearly shots have gone from roughly 2,500/yr to 10,500+ so far this year.

Yes, I ditch all the "bad" (out of focus, underexposed, etc) right off the rip, but it's obviously not a deep enough cull. What other criteria do you use to help you decide what to delete on the second or third round of culling? Do you keep just photos that are going to be post processed? Are you keeping ones that are "alright"? Do you hang onto shots that "might" be useful later? Where is your discard line in the sand?

Gobae said:

First let me say that I totally understand that culling photos is ultimately a personal decision. But since I've started shooting sports (roller derby to be precise) my total yearly shots have gone from roughly 2,500/yr to 10,500+ so far this year.

Yes, I ditch all the "bad" (out of focus, underexposed, etc) right off the rip, but it's obviously not a deep enough cull. What other criteria do you use to help you decide what to delete on the second or third round of culling? Do you keep just photos that are going to be post processed? Are you keeping ones that are "alright"? Do you hang onto shots that "might" be useful later? Where is your discard line in the sand?

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When it comes time to cull a shoot I use Adobe Bridge in Review mode. Shots are either tagged as 5-Star, 1-Star or Reject. Rejected photos are deleted. 5-Star photos are the ones that really jump out at me and that I can tell I definitely want to process. 1-Star shots are ones that don't necessarily jump out at me, but are still solid shots, technically and aesthetically; ones I think would be worth investing the time required to post-process. And that, really, is the deciding factor. Do I think the final output is going to be worth the time it will take in post-processing to get there? If I decide it's not, the shot gets deleted. I don't "do" 2, 3 or 4-Star ratings because it simply takes too long waffling about just how mediocre a shot is. A shot is either worth my time (to process), or it's not. And I value my time pretty highly.

My thing is to , after the first quickie round , survey any group of photos which pertains to a scene or subject by itself. For instance if I had ten decent shots of a player bringing the ball up the field , Id pick one of those ten to process , and only do another if I wasn't really keen on the first after developing it. After representing all the players , dramatic or pivotal events I'd dump some of the ones that did make it to processing, so there would be some waste,, I just feel more comfortable not being too abrupt about dumping. (I can go through about 500 shots in an evening, keeping 30, but don't know if you'd still call that too labor intensive.)
What really slows me down is that I keep photos for different reasons, rather than just cull to serve a single end.

For me I use a system in Lightroom and its pretty simple, if it is going to be edited it is 5 starred... I take a pass through and star all the ones that I want to process then start processing, the day after I will go back through the whole catalog and see if there is any that I missed, after the second pass the unrated get deleted