Holy North Coaster’s Batman

Picture: Spray from waves crashing on coastal rocks at sunset along the Lost Coast at Shelter Cove, Humboldt County, California

It always feels like a reason to celebrate when I get through processing a bunch of RAW images from a recent trip. Last night, I finished processing the images from my trip to the Northern California Coast, specifically Humboldt & Del Norte Counties. The final total was 657 RAW images were processed, cleaned, sized, and spotted, and are now ready the next phase.

I often get asked how I deal with so many images, and I’ve thought about writing this out in more detail. But for now, when shooting for stock, you do have to play a bit of a numbers game. Compound that with shooting for a book project, and you wind up with lots and lots of photos. However, just because I processed all of these images doesn’t mean that each image will get further down the production path. Some ‘similars’ may be marked as seconds, like film, where the files simply live on a hard disk or DVD as a type of back-up file, or kept just in case a future stock request requires a certain slight variation. A few images will get tossed, meaning that after a while of looking at them, I decide they just don’t meet critical muster. So out of those 657 images, I’m willing to guess that somewhere between 400 & 500 images will actually get fitted into submissions for my stock agencies.

Looking back, I think it took close to three weeks to process all those photos. Now it’s on to start processing images from my recent Southern California trip. Hoo-Ya!

PS: You can see more of my older North Coast Photos in my online web gallery