Exercise 4: Editing

For this exercise I wanted to apply what I had learned about workflow, selecting images and editing to a real life assignment rather than something I had come up with myself.

The opportunity for this came up when my cousin asked me to take some photographs for his wedding. The only brief I was given was to take a number of group family shots after the service, apart from that I said I would take a number of pictures with the view to covering the day.

The day after the wedding when I downloaded the images I was struck by a sense of purpose that I do not usually feel - I mostly photograph for myself either pursuing personal projects or taking images of my family and children. Because of this I often suffer from not editing my images properly: I have files of hundreds of pictures on my hard drive which are either not started or only partially completed in the editing process. As I discussed earlier I think a remedy to this is to have an output source for my pictures. For this project I needed to select the best images from the shoot, edit in Lightroom and Photoshop, print the best images and produce a photobook to show the narrative of the couples wedding day.

Stats:

1171 photographs taken in total

Technical Edit:

697 Selects

38 Deselects

Approach - I examined each photograph one by one in Lightroom and selected with a flag images I wanted to explore further. Images that did not strike me as selects were not chosen (for example compositionally not very interesting) images that had obvious technical issues were flagged as deselects.

First Selects:

468 one star or higher

352 two stars or higher

208 three stars or higher

75 four stars or higher

Approach - I examined each selected image in more detail, removing the flag if the picture did not hit the mark technically and/or compositionally. I then edited each image in Lightroom - adjusting crop, white balance, exposure, contrast and saturation as necessary. To aid further selection I rated each image. As mentioned previously, I mainly use rating as a way of indicating that I have edited an image. I rate images with 3 stars to denote 'average' using 2 stars to indicate an image with something of interest but also some sort of flaw and 4 stars to show above average. I never rate images with 5 stars at this point as I believe you need time to decide which images are the absolute best and also because the highest available rating is not something I wish to overuse.

At the same time as rating images I selected images I wanted to print with a blue label.

Output for print (blue label):

205

For the final stage of the process I had 6x4 prints made of the 205 images I had selected for printing. The main output for the couple was to be a 100 page photobook. I find that seeing an image printed greatly aids selection at this point, with individual prints it is also useful to be able to move them around and play with the order or place pictures side by side to decide on alternatives. For the photobook I wanted to feature the images in chronological order to show the events of the day as they happened so choices were mainly based around alternatives for similar shots.

Producing these images for someone else combined with the pictures being of such an important occasion for the couple was quite stressful. In the end I know my final selection of 468 images that I gave to the couple on cd is too many - my reasons for including this many is that I wanted them to have as many pictures of their day as I could give. I ended up spending so much time looking at, pondering over, selecting and editing the pictures that I eventually found it very difficult to be objective. I do not know how much this feeling is driven by my relationship with the bride and groom and by knowing many of the guests. I wonder if I would have found editing the images easier if they were less well known to me? On reflection I should have asked for feedback and advice more - I pretty much made all decisions about which images to select and which to choose for the photobook by my self. Asking someone else may have been of great benefit, perhaps I should have asked the couple for their opinion about which pictures they wanted to include in the album? The biggest mistake I made however was taking too long to complete my edit. I really need to find a strategy to complete work quicker and recognise the distractions that prevent me from doing this.