How do you select the 10 best images from a set of 300?

Question

I have read that photographers are rarely the best editors of their own images. As digital cameras make it so easy to take hundreds of shots of a given subject, the challenge of sorting and ranking them to come up with the handful of great images to share/print/publish has become so monumental that it is almost hopeless. What tools and techniques do you use to perform this task of curating images?

Answer

Here's some of what I do:

• Throw out the worst first. Blurry, blown out, excessively dark/noisy. Back-of-somene's-head is usually included here too.
• Repeat the above rule a few times, raising the bar for "worst" so that it's relative to the new set.
• Try to eliminate duplicates. This is an especially big deal when shooting in burst mode. Take X pictures that are very similar, keep exactly one. Picking the best 1 out of 5 is easier than picking the best 10 out of 50.
• Do a very brief pass over the remaining pictures, and assign some sort of rating (usually 3-5 stars by this point) based on a very brief impression of the picture. You're looking for overall aesthetic impression here, and I find that it's best judged at "first impressions". Don't think about this too much.
• Depending on how you rate your photos and how many you have, you'll probably only want to share/publish a fraction of your highest-rated photos. Less is more; even a dozen really good photos from the same scene can get boring. Throw out anything that's at all uninspiring.
• Don't get bogged down by technical qualities: framing, exposure, contrast, colour, blemishes, depth of field. All of these can be fixed in post-production if it's worth spending time on. Do pay attention to anything that can't be fixed in post: focus errors, posing.

Basically, the idea is to get really aggressive with throwing out pictures, and then spend time editing the keepers to make them awesome.

Adobe Lightroom makes this very easy; you can "reject" pictures (flag them as "bad") with one key. If your filter is set right they'll disappear immediately from your working set. You can also change your filter to include them; nothing is ever lost/deleted.

Getting good at culling the photographic herd means that you can let yourself take more shots on-site, which in turn increases your chances of getting that one amazing photo.

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