You might have noticed that I shoot a lot. I mean, I take a lot of pictures.
and if you are anything like me, you know that going through
hundreds or even thousands of pictures from a trip
to select the best ones can be a very daunting task
but fear not, because over time I've developed a process
that is relatively fast and painless to select my best images
and I wanted to share it with you in this video
I use Lightroom CC for this but you can use any software that allows you to organize your photos
in albums or folders or anything like that
you can even use regular folders in your hard drive
The idea is very, very simple. But before I even start going through the images
I like to wait. Some times it's just a few days, sometimes it's a much longer time.
For example, I only recently went through the images that I made well over a year ago in South Dakota
at the Badlands National Park
The reason why I wait is because images take some effort and time to make
And some of them require a lot of time and a lot of effort
Maybe we had to drive really far away, maybe we had to go on a hard hike
Things like that that might trick us into thinking that the images are better than they really are
The goal here is to look at our own images the way a stranger would look at them
as much as we can, of course
the reason is because everyone is going to look at them that way
if we are lucky enough to have anyone looking at them, but if we do have someone looking at them
they are going to look at them that way
only you know what it took to make that image, the effort and the time that it took
I believe that if we can look at our images that way we are going to be better at selecting the best ones
ok, so once we are not attached to them anymore, it's time to start selecting the photographs
the way I do this is, instead of making a selection from the huge, very big set of original images,
I like to narrow them down in a series of steps, and after each of those steps I have fewer and fewer images
until I end up having just a handful of images
hopefully the best ones
I have several folders that represent each of those steps. I call them #0, #1, #2, #3...
you get the idea
I have 4, but you can have as many as you need
let me show how this would work with a quick example of some images that I took at the Great Sand Dunes Ntl Park in Colorado
as you can see I have these 7 that are very similar to each other
the reason why I have so many of the same composition is because the light kept changing
if you watched the video you might remember there were some clouds that were moving really quick
and that were creating a lot of patterns on the sand
so I kept taking more photos because I liked this composition a lot
and it was changing really quick
all of them are in the folder called #0, that's the first step
I've already made the selection here but what I'd do
I would look at them, as you can see they already have flags, rejected and picked
I've already gone through these ones, but that's what I'd do
From these 7, I chose 4
those are the ones that I like the most
I select them and move them to the next step
that is folder #1
I remove them from folder #0
and the ones that I don't like, I just delete them, so they are gone
those 4 go to the next step
in the next step, I'll narrow those 4 down even further
hopefully getting 3, 2, or even just 1 to the next step
and this is not always an easy decision to make
I don't dwell on this, I don't spend a lot of time at least in the first steps of the process
I'm very quick and if I have to move 4 or 5 or 6 images that are very similar to each other to the next step, I will
because I'll have more time and many fewer images to select from in the next few steps
the goal here is to move quickly
and narrow those photographs down from hundreds to just dozens or even fewer than that
as you can see the final step of the process is a folder that I call "to publish"
every image that makes it that far is going to make it to my website, I consider my website
to be the main repository for my work, it's where I publish all of them
I post images on Instagram, Twitter and here on YouTube
but most of those haven't gone through this whole process, it's just a quick selection that I do just to share
more in real time my work
I work further on those images, I edit them a little bit more
some of them will never make it to my website
My website is the final goal here. And the prints, of course.
This is basically it, how I go from a lot of photographs... for example this most recent road trip
I don't have the exact number but it was somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 photos that I took
I'm down now to 1,000 photos, that will go down to probably 100 or 200 in the next step
and hopefully I'll end up with 50-60 images from 3 weeks of shooting across the Southwest
and that's how I do it, how I go from a lot of pictures to just a handful of them without going crazy
I'd love to hear from you, if you shoot a lot, how do handle that?
How do you select the best images? Do you do something similar? You just go insane every time you have to do it?
This is it, I hope you found this video helpful
Thank you so much for watching, and see you in the next one!