Flycatcher

With my new workflow for editing photos, I've implemented a rating system for the images on my SD card. Before I even transfer the files off the camera's storage card, I assign a colour code.

A green tag indicates that I think the photo is worth processing. Green-tagged photos are the first ones that I will edit.

Next come the yellow tags. These are assigned to photos that look almost as good as the green, but I'll only edit them if, when I'm working on a green-tagged photo, I discover that it's not quite as good as I thought it was. I'll then check the yellow-tagged images to see if I have overlooked how good it really is.

An orange tag on a photo indicates that it's not necessarily worth editing but should not be discarded. For example, if I take a photo of a bird that has its back to me, I'll favour a photo where the bird is facing me, or at least has its head turned in profile. An orange tag means the shot isn't great but it shouldn't be deleted.

A red tag is reserved for photos that didn't turn out. It's out of focus or poorly composed, or the exposure makes it unusable.

As soon as all of the files on the SD card are tagged, I'll sort them according to how they're tagged. I'll then select all of the red-tagged images and delete them: the rest are copied to my RAW storage drive.

A few weeks ago, on a trip to Bruce Pit, I spied an eastern kingbird some distance away. Using my Sony α6700 with my telephoto lens, I zoomed in as much as I could and fired off three shots in quick succession.

The bird sat on his perch for several minutes and moved around, and I captured many more photos of it before I decided to move on.

When I got home, I tagged, sorted, and deleted images according to their colour code. Initially, I was going to tag the first three shots of the kingbird in orange because the bird had its back to me, but decided to upgrade the tags to yellow because at least its head was turned sideways.

And then I saw something else in the images.

 I had to enlarge the first photo of this set and crop in to be sure of what I was seeing, and sure enough, the kingbird had its beak open as a dragonfly flew past. Looking at the next two shots, the bird had caught the dragonfly and was going to eat it.

I changed the tags to green.

I couldn't believe my luck. Looking through the viewfinder, I didn't see the dragonfly at all. And even though I could see that the bird had its back to me, I snapped the shots anyway, lest the eastern kingbird fly away and I had no shots at all.

It pays to press the shutter release when you have a focus lock on the subject, rather than wait until you have the perfect pose. Because you just might have that pose anyway.

Happy Friday!