So much to do, So little time to do it

I've been home from my trip to Oregon and California for a week now and I'm just starting to edit the images from this trip. In total, I shot about 4000 RAW files while I was away. This is about an average number for me. In the first draft, I've pared it down to about 600 usable images. Of these, I expect to end up with 400 images that are marketable. A 10% average which, I've found to be a pretty consistent number for me.

Now, I've already spent about 10 hours converting all the files to TIFFS and deleting those that are "technically" bad, meaning they are either out of focus o the exposure is way off. Once that's done, I go though again and delete similar files that ar all good but, I don't need more than a couple versions of them. Then, I go thorough again and delete all the ones that just are'nt interesting, are poorly composed or make no sense and I can't image why I ever took the picture.

Once that's done, I get down to the serious editing, spotting, color correcting, cropping etc. The image here is of Multnomah Falls in Oregon. I actually shot about 100 images here in a 90 minute period and ended up keeping about 20 of them. Waterfalls are a great subject but, hard to do well. Contrast and depth of field are issues here as well as focus. I always shoot waterfalls on a tripod with a very long exposure in order to get that soft, misty water. In this case, because the sun was streaming into the canyon, I actually added both a 2 stop ND filter and a polarizer in order to get a shutter speed slow enough to get the effect I wanted from the water. Once I started editing the image, I boosted contrast and saturation, dodged the water to whiten it up and burned the area around the water to further add contrast. Lastly, I did some USM in photoshop and we're done. Multiply that times 20 other images and add the fact that I still have about 350 pics to edit from this trip and I've still got a lot of work to do.