Member-only story
Culling
Do you know what you believe are your “best” images? And why?
I recently finished a major part of a large project to cull my “best” images. It was much harder than I thought. Culling is hard.
Why
More than once, I asked myself, “Why?” I thought this would take me 2–3 weeks. It ended up taking 4 months.
Why in the world would I take on something like this voluntarily? I felt it was necessary to be honest with myself. This is a follow-up and expansion of a previous article on critiquing your own work.
I use a multi-layer “grading” system to promote my best work up the ladder. It has been in place for several years and it seemed time to do a reality check to see if I believed my system. It is too easy to rate a picture higher just because I like it, without it being truly worthwhile.
And to be honest, there were a couple of concerns I wanted to check on. These are hard to express or admit, but I wanted to see if my recent work was as good as my earlier work and if my work, overall, was up to the standard I want for myself.
