On many shoots and workshops, the photography can be intense and heavy with gaps of down time in-between. Imagine photographing two grizzly bears wrestling for 30 minutes. You might shoot 500 images in that time. Then the bears get tired, and head off into the tall grass to sleep. Which leaves you sitting there for a long time waiting for the action to resume. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could review your images in-camera and tag the best ones to edit? The good news is you can…with a little help from some software.
I was very excited when I saw the D850 actually allows us to add a star rating to the images in-camera. Hold the Fn2 button down and use the thumb pad to add or subtract stars. Awesome! But unfortunately this star rating only shows up using Capture NX, not Lightroom. Which brought me back to my earlier technique of rating images in then field.
If I hit the ‘lock’ button while reviewing images on the back of any of my Nikon cameras, these images are ‘tagged’ in Photo Mechanic. When I browse the images in Photo Mechanic I just select ‘tagged’ from the menu to review these specific images. This is a huge help. It means when I get back to my hotel room, and using Photo Mechanic to browse my images, I can quickly go to the tagged shots, process a few, and transfer them to my iPhone using Airdrop and show them at dinner. I’ve used Photo Mechanic for years, and it speeds up my workflow considerably.