What's a good strategy for choosing which photos to keep?

Question

Since moving from a 6 megapixel DSLR to a 12.5 megapixel micro-four-thirds, the much bigger file sizes (especially shooting RAW) mean that I can't be so open about keeping everything I shoot.

I only have a 640GB primary drive for all my video and stills, and a 640GB backup drive - and they are getting fuller every day.

But going through photos and deleting bad ones can be a tedious process. I've slowly been going through old photos and pressing delete if they are obviously out of focus or have too much motion blur. But it still leaves a lot of photos that just seem uninspiring, or where I have a lot of photos that are very similar, taking up space. I'm too worried to delete them since they're actually usable, and I may find a use in future.

• What is a good process for choosing what to delete and what to keep?

• At what stage of the process do think it's best to do it?

Answer

I don't know if this is a great system, but here's what I do:

1. After the shoot/session is done I immediately sort through every frame I took looking for the 'keepers.' I do it this way because for me it is easier to choose to keep the great shots than it is to delete the borderline shots... That may just be me. :-)
2. Next I sort through every frame I didn't put in the 'keepers' pile and look for anything that is bad enough to just trash immediately- usually there are a few out-of-focus or technically flawed photos that I didn't delete 'on-the-fly' which get taken out back behind the barn and put out of my misery.
3. I then look through the 'Keepers' and see if there are any 'holes' in the shoot that I will need to fill with the shots that weren't good enough to make my 'keepers' pile, but weren't bad enough to trash... Call it my 'marginal' pile if you will. If there are holes to be filled I then pick the 'best of the worst' to fill in those holes.
4. I post-process all the 'Keepers.' If it's a personal session I post 'em, if it's a professional session I work with the client further from there to close the contract. For client contracts this is it. I keep both the 'keepers' and the 'marginal' shots forever and get ingested into my backup solution (which is an entirely different process).
5. After some time has passed (I usually do this every month for any personal work that happened 3 months prior in order to allow myself a bit of perspective) I re-examine the 'marginal' pile to see if time has changed my initial impressions of those photographs... Usually there are a few in the 'marginal' pile that I like enough to keep. The rest are shown no mercy and get to go to the round file from there.

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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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