I have two holiday photographic rituals this time of year. I have begun one and will soon get to work on the other.
Today I began going through all of my raw files from 2010. I don’t even know how many thousands of files there must be, and it is perhaps better that I don’t know! Each time I do this year-end review I find a number of photographs with potential that I did not see right after I made them. Sometimes it simply takes a bit of distance in order to see what is there; other times I just moved on to another project before I was truly finished with the previous one. Don’t be surprised to see of these photographs posted here over the next few weeks.
Soon I’ll begin the second task, trying to pick my favorite photographs of 2010. I also enjoy this since the process lets me revisit and relive some of the experiences I had as I made the photographs. Given that I work from my “daily photograph” pool, it should be easier than reviewing the raw files – instead of thousands of files there are only a few hundred. However, it always turns out to be harder than I think it will be. I think there are perhaps two reasons. First, while most of the raw files are not really worth a second look, the photographs from which I select the “favorite of the year” images are all images that I like. This makes it very hard to narrow the selection down to perhaps ten or twelve photographs. Second, in some ways I am the least qualified to understand my photographs. That may sound odd, but no one else can see them in the same way that I do since I was there when they were made and thus know things about them that only I can know. Other viewers are perhaps better able to simply view them “as photographs.”
Regarding the second task, feel free to share your ideas and suggestions concerning the selection process or even to suggest specific photographs that might have connected with you.
G Dan Mitchell Photography | Twitter | Friendfeed | Facebook | Facebook Fan Page | Email
Thanks for posting. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be able to post thumbnails of the favorites, though that could be an interesting idea – post a larger number and ask people for their input. The other way that folks who are interested could help would be to simply let me know if there are one or two favorites that you happen to remember from 2010. (Truly dedicated site readers could – though I don’t expect it! – start back on January 1, 2010 and click through the whole year. Yikes! That is actually how I’ll do it.)
Cynthia, I always err on the side of not deleting files. Storage is so cheap these days that I only toss the truly bad ones.
Dan
I often do the same thing you mentioned, and that is move onto the next project before I have finished with the images from the last shoot. And while I will toss images that are technically bad, I tend to keep all the rest while not being sure why I bothered wasting the disk space on them. But then I recently had an example. I took a picture of a Maine lighthouse (the Ram Island Ledge lighthouse) last year that I liked and I didn’t. I liked the form of the composition, but the details just made it blah and uninspiring.
But in the meantime I bought some software, plugin’s for Photoshop. And while looking at some work by another photographer, I got an idea for that picture. I hit it twice with the Smooth and Flat preset in Topaz adjust, then desaturated it and the result was like magic. It has become one of my favorite pictures ever with a very simple but elegant look.
The bottom line though is that sometimes it is worth keeping those old RAW files. You may get an idea down the road that will make a blah picture sing!
I’m looking forward to your “Best Of” post for the year. Mine should be posted tonight.
In my case, getting the set down to 30 or so was no problem but I always have trouble reducing this down to the final 10. In the end, I’ve settled on 11 (but that’s 10 in base 11 so I can still claim Top 10 :-) ).
Hi Dan,
Post a thumbnail view of your 2010 images, and we’ll “try” to help you pick one.
I say “try” because you have so many nice ones to choose from.
Especially, the Sierra ones.
RC