I had someone call me ‘the workflow guy’ this week, or something along those lines. I am quite proud of the efficiency of my workflow, for sure, and one element of my workflow which is non-negotiable is that all weddings are culled within 48 hours of the wedding and I think this is pretty much how I stay backlog free.
I’ve said workflow 4 times already. Dammit, 5 now. This is why I’m not a professional writer. Such a rule breaker.
Anyway, I’ll bring you more workflow goodness soon, but I thought since right now I’m sitting here culling Saturday’s wedding I’d talk about why I make myself cull so soon, and why I kinda love culling.
I looked through the list of who’s subscribed and I noticed a few people I don’t think are photographers, so for you guys:
culling /ˈkʌlɪŋ/ noun is the term photographers use for selecting the images we’re going to edit…
Culling for me is the most daunting part of my workflow. If you’ve ever read the book “Eat That Frog” by Brian Tracy then culling is the biggest, slimiest, most disgusting frog we have to deal with. You just have to get it eaten. Letting it sit there croaking at you, thinking about eating it will just encourage procrastination and finding reasons not to do it. Procrastination kills workflow.
So I just do it. As immediately as is possible after a wedding.
I do it first of all because of the frog procrastination thing. Once the frog has been eaten you’re free to do other things in life and work.
Secondly I do it because I want to do a preview for the couple, and I will only ever do that once it’s culled. I want to edit their preview within a day or two maximum. So I need to cull it within that time too.
Thirdly, once it’s culled, the culled set gets copied onto a hard drive that is picked up by my online backup. At this point that means I have three ‘local’ copies of the culled set (hard drive 1, hard drive 2, online backup), so I can now comfortably format the memory cards and shoot on them again.
This also means that culling and editing are two completely separate elements of my workflow. So when I come back to this wedding in a few weeks, it’s just for the edit, not for the cull and edit. Much more palatable for me.
I’ve learned to love culling because it teaches me so much about where I can improve. I don’t just look at the cull as the way to get rid of the rubbish. I pay attention to the rubbish, and try and work out why I messed something up (or why it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped). I try to spot the opportunities I maybe missed while I was shooting. Even in the images that do make the cut, I try to think actively about how I could’ve done better so that I CAN do better next time I’m in a similar situation/location.
For this reason I could never outsource culling because it would mean missing out on what, for me, is where I’m able to continually see room for improvement in my work.
Do I enjoy culling? No. That would be ridiculous. But I like learning, and it’s a cliche but it’s true, you learn the most from your own mistakes.
It also shows you when and where you overshoot. Overshooting is the main reason culling takes longer than it should. I overshoot. A lot.
Just to finish here’s my basic culling workflow:
I really believe that making culling such a priority in my workflow and being so strict with myself is the reason I hardly ever have a backlog or editing queue and I never have “format anxiety” when formatting memory cards.
Thanks for reading!
Adam
