For wildlife subject matter, the bar for a keeper is much higher than for low volume work like portraits or landscapes.
I just spent a half day photographing sandhill cranes and other subjects in the Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge (Birchwood, TN). I ended up with 1500 images in about 3 hours. I'll keep less than 100 files. A good number of those - maybe 10 images - were from a single pass by a whooping crane at close range and good light. The balance are mainly birds in flight or tight close ups of sandhill cranes and a juvenile bald eagle.
The primary purpose of the images was testing the 800mm PF on the Z50ii and Z8. I'll end up posting 3-4 images on social media, making a couple of prints, and archiving the balance. Everything will be keyworded for easy access. Anything borderline is quickly discarded. Composition problems - like overlaps, head turned slightly away, and poor wing position - are immediate discards. I'll keep 1-2 frames in a series if the wing position is excellent, but generally balance eliminating duplicates with the time it takes to figure out which should be deleted. If they are exactly the same - a 20 fps burst of a static subject - I'll run through them for a single pass at 100% or 200% and make quick decisions on discards. I'll keep more photos of uncommon subjects and rarities. I'll cull more aggressively with common subjects.
The biggest issue with wildlife is it's common to have hundreds or thousands of images of the same subject - and you only need to keep a handful. Arthur Morris photographs birds almost every day and usually takes 1000-2000 photos. He usually culls images within an hour or two of leaving the field. His approach is to run through the images, pick his best images only as selects - maybe 5-15 images - and discard the rest. The selects are immediately edited, a few shots posted in his blog, and the keepers uploaded to cloud storage. His approach is based on the idea that he photographs the same subject frequently, but there are only a few really great photos and those are what he shares. A daily blog post maintains discipline and provides a use for the images. It also makes the best photos accessible with keywords for access or search later.
Increasingly - with the high frame rates of current cameras - I'm viewing images and picking selects while the images are still on the memory card and without even taking time for download. I use Photo Mechanic. After review, I only download the selects to be edited, and reformat the card immediately after downloading and verifying the download. If the image is not outstanding, it's not a select. I don't need to view individual images at 100% on my first pass. The first pass is based on framing, composition, wing position, etc., and only the best of those images get a second look for sharpness before ingest and import. This is a different approach, but seems to work better for high volume photos. If I make a 20 frame burst, usually only 1-2 frames are really the good ones - and often I discard the entire series.
. Then I will come back a few days later , and if I'm brave I can delete the entire contents of the "rejected" folder , or decide to review the "rejected" folder images one last time before purging permanently. Works for me .. YMMV
