I went to Miss Boo's soccer tournament last weekend. I took my camera and my 70-300 lens. There was a point during the second game where I remembered how much I used to LOVE taking pictures of the girls sporting events (I haven't done it for several years). Unfortunately, this is Miss Boo's last season of high school sports, and she's not intending to participate in collegiate sports, though I hope she'll at least get involved in intramurals, to stay active and social.
I took over 600 pictures during three games and it has been an almost overwhelming task to pare them down to a reasonable quantity of high quality pictures. I almost didn't know where to start. Once I did figure out some sort of process, I decided I wanted to record that process, and where better than here? Once I get them pared down where I want them, I'll share a few here, but following is the basic structure of the process.
At some point during the first game, I realized I was shooting in both .jpg and RAW. This means I would have two files for each picture. One file (.jpg) is more compact and computer ready to view. The other file is bigger in terms of the memory it takes up, and since I knew I would be taking three games worth of photos, I switched to shooting .jpg only. One of the advantages of shooting RAW is the file captures ALL the information about the photo: every possible color in every possible pixel. This allows for greater possibilities when it comes to post-editing .Jpg files pare down what the camera computer thinks is necessary to render the photo. This makes for faster recording, smaller space, and less flexibility in terms of editing. But since I don't really LIKE to edit my photos (for two or three reasons, some of which can be fixed), I knew the .jpg files would be what I needed. So that cut out about 46 files. Only 570-some to go!
Next I viewed each picture, and deleted any that were just absolute crap. This really didn't remove very many which is good news when considering my skills, but bad news when considering how many more I had to cull!
On a second pass, I decided to take out almost every picture in which we couldn't see at least one face from our team. This was kind of tough, because there were still good pictures where you couldn't see faces, but I really had to have some criteria to determine what to keep and what to lose.
On a third pass, I took out pictures that were not in good focus. On a fourth pass, I took out most pictures that didn't convey action (these are soccer games after all).
On a fifth pass, I took out pictures that didn't tell a story. This is a little hard to explain, in part because everybody is going to see different things from a photo, so what tells a story for you might not tell a story for me. And some stories were told across multiple photos depending on what was happening in the game at the time. But again, I wanted to get this under 100 GOOD photos, and why show a photo that doesn't tell a story? I'm the author, so I can tell the story my way (which means there aren't very many photos where the other team is controlling the ball)!
I'm currently down to 253 photos. Hopefully, one more pass will do it. This (hopefully) final pass will probably be making sure I have at least one photo of each girl on the team, and no more than... say ten of any one single girl. Though I have so many of Miss Boo that it will be difficult to cut those. She was, after all, my primary focus.
Samples to follow, hopefully later today!
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