Which brings up a question...

...why do I shoot so bloody many photos at any given event?

Good question.

• Law of Averages: take a lot of photos, and something's bound to be good ;-)
• I'm not into journalistic photography, where the reporter needs one shot to augment the (text-based) story. I want to shoot the entire event visually, not just the moment
• I very consciously try to get shots of everyone, not just the stars.
• Why not? One of the particular things I like about digital photography is that there's no significant monetary cost associated with one photo, or one hundred, or one thousand
• When I empty out the compact flash card, it's re-formatted and then it's empty and then it's completely reusable
• Compare and contrast with chemical photography, which is where I came from, where I'd agonize over whether to shoot a 24 or a 36, and then agonize about having a given roll processed when all 24 or 36 frames weren't shot
• When I burn a shoot onto DVD's (which is the very first thing that I do after the images come off the CF card) my cost there is about 66 cents per DVD -- this for a high-quality Taiyo Yuden DVD and a polypropylene C-shell DVD case -- so when I burn an average DVD with maybe 230 images on it (and that wouldn't be full) my cost is about .00287 cents per image
• So (for example) the entire evening's worth of 1,047 photographs for VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife cost me 5 DVD's or $3.30 actual cash expense
• Extra Credit Question: how much would 1,047 photos cost me if I was still shooting Ektachrome?
  

OK: so, time?

You would think that it takes a ton of time to go through 1,000 shots, and in a sense it does, but the wading-through and weeding-out goes something like "nope.. nope.. nope.. nope.. wait a minute.." and it's the wait-a-minutes that get RAW converted into tiffs, and post-processed into the first-cut candidates.

Then when I've got all the first-cuts converted, cropped and adjusted I go through 'em again, which is something like "OK.. OK.. OK.. nah.." and the "nah's" get gone, and then I edit the perl script that actually generates all the jpegs and all the html, run the script, edit the resulting html a little, integrate the new html into the rest of my web site, put the jpegs up on Amazon S3, and we're good to go!