Kazakh with Eagle
Western Mongolia, 2014
I decided to backup some of my photos. Every now and then I get paranoid about losing them. As I copied my Mongolia photos, I panicked when I didn’t recognize some of the shots. Had I never looked at these? Turns out I had looked at them but my eye missed some good ones because I had a certain image in mind as I visually scanned them. I realized that I am not a good photo editor.
I recently watched a video by a National Geographic photo editor and photographer, Krista Rossow, who described how she goes through tens of thousands of photos when she is working on a photo story. You can find Krista’s lecture here:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/promotion/12006/optic-2016.html
Krista’s method requires going over your images several times and assigning them a category each time…in other words, some will be elevated some will not. As you work and elevate the best, you also winnow the number of photos. I haven’t tried it but I’m going to. Winnowing does not mean deleting, remember that!