Take your time … re-visit and re-evaluate …
A Wattled Lapwing
When you wait three years for a brilliant photography adventure you want to make sure you come away with a selection of decent photos. You have a limited time and opportunity to get those shots … there is no chance of coming back to a good spot repeatedly to learn the behaviour of the wildlife in an in-depth way and to optimise on position and light for that extra special shot. You have a set amount of time in each location, so you grab every opportunity – even those that may not seem that promising. you hedge, or over-compensate, and end up taking quite a few frames when any opportunity presents itself. Some shots you know instantly will be good ones, others you are not so sure about, but you don’t delete them in camera. The result of this is that you return home with quite a few gigabytes of files on the cards.
Beautiful dawn light
Pre-dawn breakfast!
In my case, I took over 11,000 frames in Kafue, Zambia over 10 days. Back home, once uploaded to the computer I immediately looked for the ones I thought I knew had great potential – the seemingly low hanging fruit. Those photos quickly made it onto the gallery and into the previous two blogs from Kafue. But, then I slowed down, left the computer for a while and now I am re-visiting the collection of shots in a more considerate manner. This will happen in waves over the cold drizzly winter months. I will even re-visit these raw files in months and years to come. Looking at them in new light, trying different editing approaches, and simply just discovering some hidden gems that somehow got lost in the early excitement. For my favourite shots I may create several versions, with different crops and editing styles.
A line of stripes
This is the benefit and pleasure of being an amateur shooting in Raw. With no deadline to meet, the enjoyment doesn’t end when I return from a trip to the wilderness. Clearly the highlight is to be out there among the wildlife, but there is much to enjoy and learn from the review and editing of the images.
A tiny bundle of colour with a pretty impressive beak
Getting a bit of time and distance from the photography trip helps me evaluate my shots better and with more dispassion. The initial excitement over a good encounter with wildlife and the occasion itself can sometimes cloud my judgement of what is a good shot. I mix up the sheer pleasure of being out in nature observing the action with the more considered judgement of what makes an interesting photo that tells a great story. Sometimes the two are beautifully linked, but many times they are not. Getting a bit of a distance between the event and the subsequent review and editing of the photo helps me in most cases. I am more measured in my editing, more critical of the shot, and more likely to re-consider earlier photos I thought were better than they really are.
Proud Puku
My initial edits are sometimes either too basic – in a rush to get something on my website – or they are a bit over-the-top, slightly too much saturation maybe, or an overly tight crop not allowing the subject to breathe, or maybe not enough of a crop, resulting in less impact or intimacy with the subject. Invariably when I re-visit a shot the second edit is much better. Below are two versions of the same shot, the first one is a quick edit with minimal cropping, the second is a heavy crop and with more selective editing using layers.
First edit … a bit flat
Subsequent edit … more punch and a better connection
The other benefit of waiting a bit and re-visiting the raw files after the initial excitement has died down, is that invariably I find photos that I forgot or just didn’t see the potential of in the initial review and editing cycle. A few examples of some recently developed Kafue shots are included in this blog, and … there are likely even more gems to uncover and better versions of existing photos to be had from the Kafue trip … and that is for another rainy winter’s day in a few weeks’ time or even many months’ time … and I look forward to that!
Leg spaghetti
A gorgeous bee-eater