Is this my best photo?

Is this my best photo?

It is if you are to believe the hive mind of Flickr, but I am not sure. Rating your own photo’s, filtering out the good from the bad, is possibly the most difficult photographic skill in my opinion. Nowadays, with Digital Camera’s we can easily take more and more photo’s, we can store them, organise them, and manipulate them easier than ever. In order not to be overwhelmed (or to overwhelm others ) with this volume, we need to choose the best and discard the rest. Whittling them down to the best of the best is fraught with emotional baggage, what if’s, “I can fix that…”, and “safe it for later” moments. I really struggle with this, and I am guessing I am not alone…

There are many guides on how to use rating systems in Adobe Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever… but very few guide the aspiring photographer on how to apply ratings? What makes a one star, a two star, etc? Should it all just depend on technical merit, sharpness, exposure, etc. When do artistic considerations come into it? Rule of thirds, negative space… What about simple emotion? Does simple mathematics have any place? The definitive guide on managing and sorting “Digital Assets” is The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. This is an exceptional book which I would recommend to anyone wanting some pointers on everything from file naming schemes to backup strategies. In it, Peter takes a more commercial point of view to sorting the levels of ratings applied to his shots. What I find most helpful though is the mathematical approach which is built into his system. He suggests applying ratings in a semi fixed steps:

1. One star is what’s left when all technically deficient photo’s are deleted, i.e everything after the first pass
2. Approx 10% of 1star make it to this level, which are the better shots from a shoot
3. Again approx 10% of 2 stars make it to this level

And so on. Blogger, Fraser Spiers, has a less mathematical approach, focusing on whether he would share an image on flickr or not. In his blog post on this topic, there were some very interesting comments from other readers.

I think a combination of all these approaches works for me, using the descriptive definitions to decide which rating a photo gets, but with mathematical quotas to force decisions, with the emphasis on not awarding a higher ratings for the sake of it. As mentioned above, Peter Krogh with his huge commercial library goes with 1/10th of 1/10th of… etc. This would mean that I would have a single 5 star image in my library of over 10000 images. A bit extreme, so I will shoot for a 5 fold reduction at each level. With this approach, I am forced to get over myself and down select by a factor of 5 with each pass. My library of 10400 images would break down as follows:

Now for an example:

So how do I work with this in practice? Assuming a typical import of 100 photo’s, these are the editing passes I would make:

1. Import all related photo’s from cards. The Lightroom import dialog is imensely powerful, and after this step, you should be able to tick the following of the list:
   1. Copy to single directory in Lightroom Managed Photo’s
   2. Rename
   3. Convert to DNG
   4. Backup
   5. Apply basic Copyright and Metadata
   6. Apply initial keywords
   7. Generate 1:1 previews
2. Quickly scan through, removing rubbish, duplicates, blurry, etc. Mark as rejected using “X”, and then deleting. Assign all remaining 1 star, let’s assume it is 95, resulting in the following ratings: (*:95, **:0, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
3. Scan through again, stacking similar, or edits (shouldn’t be any at this stage), put best on top. Assign selects or those that might be ok with some processing, cropping a 2nd star, ratings are now: (*:76, **:19, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
4. Third pass, these are the photo’s good enough for Flickr / Sharing. Give them a 3rd star (*:76, **:15, ***:4, ****:0, *****:0).
5. Picks of the shoot, not picked immediately, but perhaps a reflection of views on Flickr – 4 star (*:76, **:15, ***:3, ****:1, *****:0).
6. After time, best of collection – 5 star

Related Posts:

1. Spectra Photo / Digital Beginners Travel Competition
2. Spectra Photo / Digital Beginners Competition – Lessons Learned
3. New Gallery – Rome
4. Protecting an Image by Watermarking…
5. New Gallery – Jack L Returns To Dolans

Author: jbourke

6 Responses to “The Most Difficult Photographic Skill – Rating Your Photo’s!”

1. Jonathan Bourke says:

   August 13, 2008 at 12:47 pm

   Note to self… I really need to improve my HTML
2. Spectra Photo / Digital Beginners Travel Competition | JonathanBourke.ie says:

   August 28, 2008 at 5:33 pm

   [...] haven’t often entered photography contests, primarily because I couldn’t decide what shots to submit (as you will soon see, that hasn’t changed much!). Spectra Photo & Digital Beginners are [...]
3. ferdia2010 says:

   August 29, 2008 at 10:19 pm

   Good photo, the building takes a little from the scene (nature aspect), people walking along the edge, setting sun in background would be nice.
4. Jonathan Bourke says:

   September 1, 2008 at 10:52 am

   Thanks for the feedback Ferdia2010. Even I am not sure that it is my best, but it consistently gets hits every day on Flickr… I have many in my library that mean more to me, but until published, and open to scrutiny, they might as well not exist. From my leaving cert english, Thomas Grey’s “Elegy written in a country Churchyard” applies:

   “Full many a gem of purest ray serene
   The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
   Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
   And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
5. Jason says:

   October 7, 2008 at 5:15 pm

   Jonathan,

   nice article, I too have trouble sorting out photos, your approach could be helpful.

   As regards the photo, very interesting exposure, colour and light works really well. The crop is spot on.
   In terms of your best photo, some of your Jack L shots are exceptional, in terms of sharpness, texture etc especially considering the shooting conditions,

   Regards,
   Jason
6. Jonathan Bourke says:

   October 7, 2008 at 6:20 pm

   I find it really working for me, as it removes the emotional element – I am not longer fighting with myself whether to include a shot or not…

   Either it is in due to the process or not, and I can do it pretty quick now.

   My last gallery from Thomond Park went from 130+ shots to an upload of 28 (I know I have some sequences, so I could probably have reduced that further).

   Only change I would make is that at the moment it is the 2stars which get uploaded to Flickr… with very little editing.

   Jonathan