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 1 star 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