Culling 1,200 frames in 90 minutes

A typical pit shoot leaves you with somewhere between 100 and 500 frames, depending on the artist's energy and your shooting style. A full festival day across multiple sets will get you well over 1,000. The job of culling is to find the keepers, fast.

You do this fast because the editor wants the files by 9am and you went to bed at 2.

Here is the workflow we actually use.

Why speed matters

Music photography is a same-day delivery business at the high end. Editorial pickups, label use, the artist's own socials by morning. If you cannot turn images around in twelve hours, you do not get the second booking.

That is not optional. That is the whole job after the shutter clicks.

Set up before the show

Open Lightroom before you leave the house. Make a new collection for the show. Name it artist-date so you can find it later. Make sure your import preset is set:

• →Build smart previews on import
• →Apply a basic develop preset that matches your house look (a starting point, not a final edit)
• →Add keywords for the artist and venue

Doing this setup at home means when you import after the show you click one button and go to bed for forty minutes while it processes.

Two photographers, two approaches

We do not cull the same way. Here is mine, and here is Colin's.

Colin's hero folder

Colin scrolls through everything and drags the frames he likes into a separate folder. Those are his heroes. He edits in there, not in the full set. The cull and the edit are the same step for him.

It works if you have a strong eye and you trust your first instinct. It does not work if you second-guess.

My two-pass cull

I do it in passes.

1. Pass one: flag. Press P for keep, X for reject. Hold down the right arrow. No second-guessing yet. This is the survivor cull. Out of a couple of hundred frames I keep maybe 60.
2. Pass two: rank the keepers. 4 stars for the good ones, 3 stars for medium. Now I am being picky.
3. Edit. Sometimes I apply a preset across the 4-stars and adjust where needed. Sometimes the lighting was unusual enough that I edit each manually.
4. Narrow if necessary. If I have too many 4-stars to deliver, I push the best of them up to 5 stars and only deliver those.

Whichever method you use, the principle is the same: stop polishing frames that are not going out. Edit only what you are going to send.

Metadata: the step everyone forgets

Once the keepers are picked, select all of them at once and add the metadata in a single batch:

• →Artist name
• →Venue and city
• →Date
• →Photographer credit

We forget this step sometimes too. It feels like extra work after a long night. But search and discoverability live in the metadata. Editors search archives by it. So does Google. A keeper with no metadata may as well not exist.

Export and file naming

Export to a Google Drive folder. File naming matters more than people think.

Our format: ArtistName-@photographerhandle-@codaphotos.jpg

So a Sziget shot of Post Malone by Colin lands as:

PostMalone-@colindarbyshir3-@codaphotos.jpg

Why: when the artist or their team reposts the image, the credit tags are right there in the filename. They do not have to look us up. They do not have to guess. The photographer gets tagged. Coda gets tagged. The image stays connected to the people who made it.

This is a small habit. It pays off every time a label or a music magazine reuses one of our frames months later and the credit travels with the file.