On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 06:54:15PM -0700, John Celio wrote: > How do you decide what to cut and what to keep when you've shot more than > one good photo of a subject? > > Assuming you feel like all or most of the photos of said subject are good, > how do you distance yourself from your personal attachment to your work or > subject, in order to objectively edit it all down to something more > manageable than (for instance) the big ol' gallery I posted over the > weekend? > > Objectivity is the goal, I think. How do you achieve it?
It's not really all that hard, is it? You just need to group the shots into roughly similar classes, and then only select the best one (or, possibly two) shots from each group, unless there is an overwhelming reason for including more than that. On your Fleet Week gallery, for example, you probably only need one shot of "Team Oracle", one shot of the marine helicopters, etc. Similarly, you don't need fifteen or sixteen shots of the Blue Angels in formation, flying across the frame, where the only real differences are the number of planes in the shot, and whether or not smoke is on. Two examples would probably suffice. Similarly, you really don't need four different crossover shots. I'd edit the Blue Angels images down to a couple of "multi-plane with smoke trail" shots, the "almost perfect" crossover, the "four stacked tail on" shot, and a couple of others. That, together with Team Oracle, the helicopters, and two or three free choices would give you a gallery of ten to twelve images - about right for the average viewer. If you know you are presenting to an audience with a particular interest in the subject you can double the number of images in the gallery, but even then going beyond a couple of dozen images is overdoing it. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
