Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Culling the Shoot

One of the biggest benefits of digital wedding photography as opposed to film photography is that you can take a ton of pictures without worrying about using up expensive film. You can easily weed out the unwanted photos later without having lost anything but a little bit of memory (until you format your card, as I explain in Chapter 10). This weeding out process is called culling the shoot.

Culling the shoot is the first thing I do with the wedding pictures after loading them onto my computer and importing them into Adobe Lightroom (Chapter 10 explains this process). During that time, I go through all of the images to decide which photos are worth editing and which are not. Generally, I have about 2,000 pictures at the start, and end up with 600 to 800, which is a much more manageable number! Because I use Adobe Lightroom for this process, I simply move my chosen images into a new collection set (which I talk more about in the next section) instead of deleting the images from my hard drive.

Though all photographers are unique and may judge their work based on slightly different criteria, you can use a few standards as a gauge when culling a shoot:

Exposure: Is the image too light or too dark? If the photo is just a little light or dark, you may be able to fix it ...