Amazingly, I planned ahead for this. I packed my laptop, and made sure that it was fully charged. Why on earth would I want my laptop with me, you might be wondering?
Simple - I wanted to ensure that I always had space on my memory cards. As I filled one up, a quick eject during a quiet moment, slip it into the SD card slot, and transfer away. This is where a camera like my Nikon D7100 is really awesome - it has slots for two memory cards.
The real work, in an event like this, comes when you get home, and have to sort through several thousand images (yeah, I was busy). I've competed in a number of races, and always get sent proof pictures from race photographers to purchase. By and large, these aren't artistic masterpieces - simple shots with no real framing aesthetic. I made a very conscious decision to NOT do this with my own photos. Which meant a lot of work in Lightroom.
A lot.
So workflow mattered here. And I did have to change how I normally do things. Did I individual edit every photo? Nope. Did every photo get edited? Yep. Here's how:
1) I began with a single photo, and edited it to look "nice" - Temperature, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, and Vibrance were the main settings I worked on.
2) I selected that photo. Then, while holding "Shift" (Windows users), scrolled through to the end of the block of photos that had the same camera settings (shutter speed and f-stop), and had similar lighting conditions. Still holding "Shift," I then click that last photo - this selects that whole block.
3) Ctrl + Shift + S - this lets me apply select settings from my first image to the whole block. So I select the ones which I edited.
4) Scroll through, select the shots I want to export from RAW to JPEG, and export.
5) Repeat for each block.
6) Sleep, because this was a TON of work!
I learned some invaluable lessons from this - I was never a big "optimize my workflow" guy with Lightroom. I didn't shoot enough to really care if I wasted button clicks. But with this kind of volume? Optimize, optimize, optimize!
Also, it became apparent that I should learn to harness all that Lightroom can do. It's not Photoshop, but it's still extremely powerful. So I went out and snagged a used copy of Scott Kelby's "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Book for Digital Photographers." And now, to read!
Equipment Used
Nikon D7100 Camera70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens
Images
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