The One Shot I Kept Out of Perhaps One Hundred and Fifty

In art economy is always beauty. - Henry James

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. - Ansel Adams

I’d like to share a tip that I believe can make anyone a better photographer. It has nothing do to with exposure, ISO settings or even that instant talent-maker HDR. This is an incredibly simple way to improve your photography, yet many people resist it. Let’s talk about deleting those photos you took.

Now, before we get started, there are obviously photos you “have to keep.” Must-haves like your best friend in front of the monument, the big landmark building and the family group shot may not be avant-garde works of genius, but they are neccesary and you will be yelled at if you delete them so, please, do keep them safely stored away before attempting this process.

When we talk about making beautiful photography, however, we should remember that we can say more with a few powerful images than we can with a whole folder full of average snapshots. Sometimes less really is more, and this holds very true for photography. Too often we are attached to our photographs. We assume that if we cull even one of them somehow we have lost work or part of the experience. I’d like to offer the idea that everything from arriving at the location to shooting the scene, importing the images, and then editing down this massive collection to just a few great shots is the work that needs to go into coming up with great images. Which do you think will have a more profound impact on the viewer as they look through your gallery- one hundred shots of a singer, with all sorts of angles, lighting, settings and poses… or a single shot with just the right look and emotion captured at the peak of the action?

I’m not saying we should shoot only perfect photos. I’m saying let’s shoot more and keep less.

I’d like to share my workflow process here. For a given subject I might take anywhere from 10-100 photos or even more. I try to shoot every idea that I can come up with, every angle, and a variety of shutter speeds and settings. By the end of a day I could potentially have a thousand shots saved. Not everyone shoots this volume, but even so the concepts here hold true.

So here it is…

I use Adobe Lightroom which I can recommend to just about anyone. Even if you are already a Photoshop user, Lightroom simply does a much better job than Photoshop or Bridge at organizing and editing down your shoots. If you don’t use Lightroom, I am sure the concepts here can be applied to most image organization tools.

Take all of these shots into Lightroom in Library view. Start at the first image and enlarge it to full screen. From here, use only two keys to start editing photos: right arrow and “P.” The right arrow key scrolls one image at a time in large view. For each photo that could potentially be a keeper, hit the P key to select the “pick” flag. Continue with this until you hit the end of the stream. It’s not a final run, so go ahead and choose any photo that has potential. Typically this might wind up being 25 out of 100 photos.

After this run is complete, select “select by flag - unflagged photos” from the top menu in Lightroom. This chooses anything you didn’t make a pick. Then it’s time to simply hit the delete key and remove them from Lightroom’s library.

At this point, do a second run the same way. Starting at the first image scroll one at a time and hit “X” this time to reject any photo that does not seem as good as the others in some way. It could be a distracting pedestrian, a bad facial expression, less than perfect focus, anything. After this run is complete, choose “delete rejected photos” from the top menu. This might take our original 100 photos, then culled down to 25, down to only 10 or 15.

It’s also important to realize that the human brain works best when given a period of rest between tasks.  Walk away from your photos for a couple of hours before making this next final edit.  When you come back and look at your photos again, you will find at least one or two that no longer work as well as you thought.  You might also see new strengths in other photos.  The time spent letting your brain rest will allow you to see new things about your photos when looking at them a second time.  It’s an amazing phenomenon.

After this is complete, we are left with a set of potentially good photos with no obvious flaws. This third and final review is the most important one, and it’s made easy by the fact that we aren’t looking at 100 photos - only 10 or 15. For this review, stop at every photo and think to yourself, “would I stop and look at this photo if it were just hanging on a wall somewhere with no introduction?” Think about it as objectively as you can and, if the answer is no, reject it with the “X” key. When you are finished with this run, delete all rejected photos once again.

At this point you might have 5 keepers. You might have just 1 or 2. And you might have none. (it happens to me all the time) Not to fret - you haven’t lost a hundred images, you’ve gained a few great ones. These are the only images worth putting the time and effort in for detailed adjustment and retouching. Another advantage - you now have way more time to devote to the adjustment process because you aren’t dealing with so many images. Try it and see if the quality of your final photos hasn’t improved.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.