People often ask me why it takes so long to post
photos for the dog trials and horse events, so let me put it into perspective.
First of all, what you see on my website is the end result
of many hours of work. Sometimes I get really lucky and get a few photos that
are “perfect” Typically however, what you see is NOT how the photos come off
the camera.
When I process photos, I do three edits. The first is to
delete any obviously “bad” photos - blurry shots, or ones where a dog ran behind
a sheep or cow, or a horse throws in a crazy posture. I also eliminate the “butt
shots”, when an animal has turned away from the camera. Personally I’d rather
see the dog or horse’s faces, or at least a reasonable profile. With the second
edit I look more closely to make sure I didn’t miss anything the first time,
and to determine the best photos for YOU. The last edit is to make any
corrections to exposure, color, add meta data, and add my watermark.
While processing photos for the last two events, I set the
stopwatch on my cell phone to see exactly how long it took to edit the photos
from start to finish. I timed the processing on each folder (that being all of
the selected photos for one animal), for numerous files with varying numbers of
photos in each file, then divided the total time by the number of photos in
that file. On average, it takes 3 minutes and 15 seconds for EACH photo.
What that all means is that if I have 1,600 photos to go
through (the exact amount of photos from the last horse show), it takes a
MINIMUM of 75 hours to get what you see on the website. That does not include the first two edits, and that’s working around a full time job, meals, housework and making time to
work with my own dog.
It is very tedious work, and admittedly, somewhat boring.
It’s not my favorite part of photography, but a necessary task, and after several years and much trial and error, I finally have it down to an artistic assembly line.
