China: The Final Edit

The bicycle, the red belt, the people, the gray sky, and this particular shade of green all evoke Beijing for me. If you just like the composition, that's okay too. (By the way, this and the photo below will look a lot better if you click to enlarge it to its full resolution of 800x600 pixels.)

I shot somewhere around 600 images during my 9-day visit to China. Allow for the fact that two of those days were spend travelling there and back, and my average was still less than 100 shots per day. For some photographers that's amazingly frugal, for others it's quite low. Regardless, 600 images is a lot more than you'd want to show anyone at any one time. A quarter of that amount would be a lot. A tenth would be more manageable, assuming they represented the best of the lot and could still hold a viewer's interest. Even then, any collection of pictures needs something to tie it together--a theme, a style, a location, a color palette, a genre--anything that helps the viewer feel that your selection was purposeful rather than random.

Keep in mind that when you have a large number of photos to work with you often have the luxury of being able to create more than one collection, which is a good reason to shoot generously in the first place. Had I intended to tell the story of my family's visit to Xi'an to see the terra cotta warriors, I would have shot accordingly and would have the photos I'd need for each episode, from start to finish. In this particular case I was able to create one collection of family photos, a second collection of beauty shots of tourist sites, and a third of Beijing and Xi'an street photos.

My basic process is as follows:

1. Delete the dross--the photos that are hopelessly out of focus, blurred, poorly exposed, or just plain dull. Removing this sort of visual clutter tightens up the overall shoot, saves future editing time, and helps conserve hard drive space.
2. Pick out the obvious winners--the ones I knew were good even when I was taking them, as well as the ones I barely remember shooting but that pop out at me when I review them later. Even the best almost always need some amount of cropping and adjustments to contrast, white balance, saturation, and so on. That's fine, so long as I think it's worth the time and effort. If not, then by my definition that photo is not a winner.
3. Further separate the best photos into a collection that I can sequence in an esthetically pleasing way. My hope is to create a synergy between them such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if it doesn't always work out that way, that's what I'm shooting for.

I can tell you from personal experience that it's a lot more pleasant being on the outside of a crowded bus looking in than the other way around.

What about the photos that fall in-between? Well, I may save them for a different project, such as a family photo album or scrapbook, or I may just like looking at them on occasion to remember a particular place and time. No problem. Just because an image isn't good enough for to print or display on the web doesn't necessarily make it "bad."

So far I've used my two previous posts to show you a cross-section of highlights from the trip. If you'd like to see the complete edited collection, visit my online gallery on Zenfolio. Zenfolio allows you to comment on individual photos, so let me know if you think any are particularly strong or weak.