Panama By the Numbers
Yesterday at 2:26 PM I did a little happy dance – I finally completed post-processing my Panama pics! At times I swore I would never take so many pictures again, other times I was thrilled that I actually got a good shot of a skulking bird. Here are some stats about the pics that I hope you will find as interesting as I do:
Shots Taken – 5600
Shots Deleted – 4816
Keeper Shots – 784
This means that of all the shots I took over the 10 day Panama tour I deleted 85% of them and kept 15%. This Keeper rate is actually HIGHER than usual. Although I would like to attribute this to my growing skills as a bird photographer, truth-be-told it probably has to do more with lowering my level of acceptance. When I go birding around here and take pictures of a bird I already have many good pictures of, I reject only the very best pics. In Panama (or any region with different birds) I keep poor pictures because I’ll probably never get another chance to photograph that species. A Documenting Shot (remember our friend the QSAR?) is a nice “keepsake” of the time I saw a Lifer.
Let me delve into this a little deeper. Setting aside the 85% of the pics that were deleted, I had 784 Keepers. I do post-processing on my computer using Lightroom Classic and I assign every Keeper a color rating: Green is a GreatBirdPic, Yellow is Good Bird Photo, and Red is Documenting Shot. Here is my Panama distribution of Keepers:
GreatBirdPic (like the Black-breasted Puffbird) – 72%
Good Bird Photo (like the Chestnut-headed Oropendola) – 23%
Documenting Shot (like the Dot-winged Antwren) – 5%
If I had been taking pictures of local birds I probably wouldn’t have kept the Good Bird Photos or Documenting Shots – almost 30% of my total. However many of these poorer quality shots, like the Dot-winged Antwren above, were Lifers so I kept them. More about keeping poor shots in a later post.
Just one more point before you nod off while reading – I did come away with some pretty good shots. I ended up with 139 (18% of the kept total) GreatBirdPics/Award Worthy quality pics. A majority of these higher quality pics were taken while observing at feeders – the birds perch and feed out in the open around feeders and are much easier to shoot. I’ll be sharing many of these shots with you in subsequent posts. Here’s a great shot of a hummingbird named a Green-crowned Brilliant at a feeder:
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