A couple of weeks ago I responded to a request to sort out up to a dozen of my best pictures from the last year, and spent quite a time going through my work, and picking out the pictures I most liked from the many thousands I’ve taken.
It was a difficult job, not least because there were so many to chose from – though of course not all of them are at all memorable. I’m never really happy with the idea of ‘best pictures’ either; pictures that would be good for some purposes may be hopeless for others. Much that I take is in any case not really intended as individual pictures, but to work with others to tell a particular story or describe a particular event. But there are some pictures which stand out for various reasons.
I’ve probably made between 100,000 and 150,000 exposures so far in 2012. Of these perhaps 5% get deleted on camera, mainly while I’m travelling home after taking pictures, and mainly for technical reasons. The screen on the back of the camera is too small to really do more than sort out the really useless images.
Back home I let Lightroom copy and rename all the images, and quickly go through them on screen with just the automatic processing applied. There will be quite a lot of near-duplication as I’ve worked at a particular idea, and I’ll try to pick the best, giving it two stars. Occasionally there might be a couple I’m not sure about which is best, and I’ll decide I need to process both. Quite a few things I’ve tried don’t work out at all, but typically I end up with around 1 in 10 of the pictures I think worth pursuing.
I’ll then go through these tagged pictures again, and give a colour rating to a smaller group that will tell the story effectively for Demotix. Lightroom has four colour ratings that can be applied with a number key – yellow, green, blue and red – and I use a different colour for each story I’ve taken on a particular day. A story on Demotix can have a maximum of 25 pictures, but often will only need a dozen or fifteen. Those images are then manually processed, with appropriate adjustments of contrast, brightness etc and dodging and burning and so on before keywording, captioning and then outputting them with my Lightroom Demotix preset and submitting.
Agencies would like the news sent them before it happens, and for ‘breaking news’ you need to get your pictures to them within minutes. I decided not to try and compete, but instead to concentrate on quality, on telling stories both in pictures and text, though often now I send the pictures first before writing the often lengthy stories that go with them.
Later, often a week or too later, when I have time I’ll go through all the tagged pictures, processing them, and using my Lightroom presets for web images and for full size jpegs to output copies. The web images go on My London Diary (and a few here) and full size jpegs are my reference images. So far for 2012 I have just over 12,000, all stored in a folder for the day they were taken. Usually when I’m asked to supply an image I work from these jpegs, though for special purposes I’ll go back and re-process from the raw files – which I keep backed up with one copy on DVD and another on an external hard drives.
Looking through 12,000 takes quite a while, but is quicker and easier with dedicated file viewing software than with Lightroom or Photoshop. The free FastStone Image Viewer which was recommended to me here a few weeks back enables you to view whole screens of thumbnails rapidly at a reasonable size – and is almost as good as ACDSee which I used to use.
I wanted a dozen, but on my first trawl through I found around 65 that I copied into a folder for a final selection – and these included a few similar images. I’ll perhaps take a few more this month that will qualify, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll do a review of my own year in photography, with some of these pictures and a few comments on them.
Shia Muslims on Park Lane in their 31st Arbaeen procession in London, the culmination of 40 days of mourning the martyrdom of the grandson of Mohammed, Imam Husain, killed with his family and companions at Kerbala in 680AD. More at Arbaeen Procession in London.
Taken with the 10.5mm DC format full-frame fisheye, it illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of using lenses of this type. The curved horizon helps in this image, as too does the flare and ghosting – and this is more effective in a larger image than this. But with a 180 degree diagonal angle of view its often hard to avoid having the sun in an image.
It was difficult to take because I had to be really very close to people who were very energetically raising their arms and thumping their chests to get the kind of image I wanted, and keeping out of their way was tricky. What makes this picture better than the many others I’ve taken of this and similar events is the framing and the two prominent arms in the foreground, with the tattooed arm behind them in the centre of the picture. The line of flare ghosts seem to point to that tattoo also. The mix of black and white tops along with the bare flesh also adds something, and there is even a little touch of red at the top left that some people think indispensable to a picture!
Some of this was planning, working to try and get the image, but there is too a bit of luck, a little bit of magic, involved – as in most of my favourite images.
A couple of weeks later disabled activists chained their wheelchairs together in a protest “calling for the dropping of Welfare Reform Bill, urging savings cutting tax evasion by the rich rather than penalising the poor and disabled”. Disabled Welfare Reform Road Block.
The picture above for me encapsulates much of the event – the chain, the wheelchairs, the placards and the people involved (one of them himself a photographer.) Taken with the 16-35mm, the leaning speaker adds a force to the image.
Both of these were in the final selection of a dozen I made, and the lower one is I think being used on a calendar. Last year I made my own personal calendar from 2011 pictures, and I may get round to doing the same from this year’s images.