Photographer Chase Jarvis is one of those photographers who employs staff. Yeah, that’s when you know you’ve arrived.
Anyway his lead assistant Scott Rinckenberger wrote a great blog post back in March, explaining how the pros in an office like his plough through many thousands of images to pluck out the best stuff.
As someone who finds it hard to summon the motivation to go through 100 or so photos from a family get-together, I found his advice really useful.
The trick is to go through your entire shoot in sweeps. Each sweep narrows down the selection criteria for the next. You start off just filtering out the completely unusable photos, and end up with a small handful of the very best of the best.
Scott wrote:
…Years of photo editing for one of the heaviest trigger fingers in the industry have honed my skills. And like a young ninja student who feels the sting of every misstep but grows to be a master, almost untouchable, oblivious to pain, I have conquered the edit. You can too.
It’s not necessarily about the how of using stars – cos it’s a pretty simple concept to grasp, after all – it’s the why.
