Exercise 4 - Editing

This exercise is multi part and in summary is involved in taking a set of images and performing successive edits on the set to produce a selection of just two final images. In sequence the edits are technical edit, selects, first select, group review and final triage.

The initial selection of images comes from Exercise 1 - your own workflow -1. The shoot consists of a series of 46 portrait shots of my son.

My immediate first comment about the technical edit is that for the shots taken there are very few shots obviously out of focus, showing camera shake or badly exposed. This is partly due to exercise where it was controlled, well paced environment with time to consider each photograph, use a tripod and to consider where I wanted to the model to be in each shot. There are pictures where the sunlight had burnt out a little of the highlights in the hair. As this is fixible I have chosen not to reject such shots at this stage.

The next edit will be for the second exercise taken of a street scene and I can already see that this technical edit phase will capture much more faulty pictures just by nature of the exercise.

The next phase is the initial selection. This is a more creative selection and is subjective, dependant on personal preference, likes and dislikes. Of the intial 46 I retain 19 shots at this stage. I will show my inital selection below:

I will show photographs below which are the result of my first select. I will also detail my thought process for subsequent "passes" as I reviewed selection to further whittle down selection until we reach final choice difficult choice.

Choice 01 - What I like about this photograph is the compact relaxed pose and the slightly cheeky expression. slightly burnt out on hair but nothing that can't be fixed.

Choice 02 - I like the orange hedge in the background thrown out of focus by the apertur helps to focus attention of portrait. Background slightly messy. I like the off centre pose and not looking into lens.

Choice 03 - very happy pose cropped tighter than others. Again I like the background. Model looking straight into lens. Burnt out highlights in hair.


Choice 04 - My favourite picture. Very relaxed and manages to capture a certain happiness and cheekiness all at the same time.


Choice 05. Very simple pose with old shed in background. Direct look into lens.
Slightly soft focus which depending on point of view either adds to detracts from picture. Dislike the position of the hands and would prefer then either in shot or cropped.



















Similar to first shot, but like hand position more natural although lacking a little in the facial expression.

Dislike messy background although do like expression and tighter crop. Burnt out in face. I think of my first select this is my least favourite and so already likely to be dropped by next edit.

The final selection did prove difficult. I was able to edit down to final three. From here I did have an obvious favourite but choice between last two was touch and go and each picture had elements I liked. I will show final selection below.



My standout favourite picture of the shoot. was an immediate and obvious choice for me. Have cropped image and tidied this up very slightly from original, reducing highlights in hair and shadow in face.




I chose this picture and present here partially edited to remove some of the highlights. Imperfect in many ways but reason I chose it was because of the smile and the direct look into lens. Like the background although telegraph pole sprouting from Robbie's head not ideal and I might also have taken that out.

Conclusion
A very useful structured exercise in editing. Reducing from a large set of photographs using a series of "filters", starting with broad filter, getting rid of technically imprefect pictures although I did choose to qualify this by keeping pictures I thought worth retouching. Next looking artistically at photographs and removing those that don't satisfy creatively. Also removing pictures that were wimilar and finidng best of those From there to final selection was a process of applying successively finer "filters being more and more critical and discerning.

I have never used such a structured approach and instead would have jumped in at end stage looking for final picture as my first selection.

Gave me a useful insight to process that photo editors might go through to find successful competition entrant or photograph for publication.