I’ve just returned from almost two weeks in Indonesia.  To say the warm weather and water was wonderful is an understatement!  But the cold evenings back in Perth have given me the chance to just sit down in front of the computer and churn through my photos.

I’m always disappointed when I return from a trip and look through my photos.  They are never as good as I hoped, I’m my own worst critic.  Saying that, I did get some good shots that I’m happy with but sorting through them is always such a massive job. 

On an average dive, I take around 100 photos so after four nights in Bali, and seven nights in Komodo, I amassed around 3500 photos!  Yikes!  So how do I begin to tackle what appears to be a mammoth task of sorting and processing images.

At the end of each day of diving, I download my photos into my Lightroom catalogue on my laptop.  I then do a quick run through the day’s images, deleting the totally out of focus shots and setting a white flag against the best shots.  If there are several similar good shots, I flag them all with the idea of further refining them later.  Once I’ve done this first run through, I tend not to look at them again until I get home.  An initial run through should see around 10% of the images flagged.  I’ve been told this is normal, this 10% is known as your ‘hero’ shots, they are the good shots that are worth spending time working on.

Once home, I connect my laptop to my large colour- calibrated monitor and run through the flagged images.  Some I unflag, as what may have looked good on the small laptop screen, isn’t really that good when viewed on the big screen.  Then starts the post-processing.

I don’t do a lot of post-processing but I do shoot in RAW format so some processing is required.  This usually inlvolves white balance, global tonal adjustments, minor cropping and dustspot removal. 

I then choose a small selection of the images to display on my website.  This is usually around 10% of the 10% or the ‘superhero’ shots!  I also put these images into a photobook.  I make one after every trip as a way to show my images to my family and friends, otherwise they just sit on my computer and are never seen in print. 

So watch this space, my Bali and Komodo images will be up soon!  In the meantime, here’s a Komodo dragon from the beach at Horseshoe Bay on Rinca Island.