I spent yesterday afternoon at the Northwest Folklife Festival, primarily eating, hanging out with a friend, and taking photos at the Tango event in Center House - one of my favorite photo opps of the year. This morning was spent editing the 380 photosraphs. I picked up a great editing system from fellow photographers at a recent workshop in Cusco, Peru. Using Adobe Lightroom's (which is my software of choice in editing and post-processing) starring system, I did an initial edit of shots that showed "some promise." In this case, I ended up with 146 "**" photos.
The next round was a more critical examination of the shots and weeding through some near duplicates, ending up with 85 "***" photos. Still way too many for most purposes, but I was clearly getting down to the better shots. Now I paid a lot of attention to the edges of the photos and other "extraneous" elements that detract from the subject of the photo. This edit brought the working total down to 29 "****" images. These are likely the ones that, over time, I will make color, saturation, and other minor adjustments (even some cropping as needed).
But there's still one more edit to go - those "best of the best" shots. Here I did side-by-side comparisons in Lightroom's "Library" mode to narrow the field. I finally settled on 7 photos, or about 2% of the original photos, for the "*****" rating. These are the shots I'll start with and will likely print several of these for upcoming exhibitions. All of this took about an hour and was relatively easy and painless - probably equally divided time-wise since its clearly harder as it goes. Photoshop and other software programs offer similar ways of quickly going through and editing photos in a series of iterations. Highly recommended!
By the way, the above photo is one of the "7." I selected it because its shows both motion and emotion. (And it's hard to go too wrong with a touch or two of red!)
