Exercise 1.04 Editing

A still frosty morning provided an excellent opportunity for some macro photography in the garden – an early start to catch it before the sun melted the ice.

After allowing the camera and lens to cool down to the ambient temperature I set up the camera in aperture priority, on self-timer and tripod mounted. It was set up for three-frame bracketing, so I could use HDR if required and also to be able to select the optimum images for the light conditions – still quite dull, but the whiteness of the frost had a significant impact on the exposure. I varied the aperture to give both long and short depth of field.

Initially I had 84 images to download, using Lightroom and saving into ‘Photographs’ > Downloads > 2012 > 2012-01-29 with the prefix of ‘frost’

In Lightroom I created a new Collection Set under OCA > DPP > 1.04 Editing.

I created a collection in this set – 1 As Downloaded – into which I referenced all the imported images.

Step 1 – The technical edit

I selected all the images in this collection and created another collection – 2 Technical – into which all the selected images were imported. I then removed images from this collection which were obviously technically poor – mainly due to under / over exposure because of the bracketing, but also because of some slight movement of the plants due to a light breeze which was developing. This technical edit reduced the number of images in the ‘technical’ collection to 37.

Step 2 – The selects

Selecting all the images in ‘2 Technical’ collection I created another collection ‘3 Selects’ into which all the selected images were imported. I ranked these remaining images using the ‘star’ system which made it easier to identify the poorer images – removing all images with a score below 1 reduced the number of images to 22.

Step 3 – The first selects

I selected all 22 images in this collection and created another collection – ‘4 First selects’ – into which all the selected images were imported. In this collection I removed the 1 star ranked images. These were marked down, in many cases by comparing them to similar images and scoring higher on the ‘preferred images’. In some instances the contrast didn’t make the image ‘buzz’ or I selected an image with less depth of field than one that showed more detail in the background. This reduced the number of images to 15 – all of which had star ratings of 2 or 3.

Step 4 – Group and review

Having had a break of 12 hours I’ve looked again at the selects / first selects and come back to the decisions I made originally.

I’d have to say that this is the system I’d devised and work through on most of my projects – It may not have been so strictly laid out and I didn’t make the different collections, but the workflow is just the same. In practice I’d delete the rejected images from the hard drive instead of retaining them in the ‘as downloaded or ‘technical’ collections.

Step 5 – A final choice

The ranking system in Lightroom makes it very easy to view just the images ranked as say ‘3 and above’ without creating new collections so selection becomes much easier. With this filter employed, the choice is reduced to five images, of which I think two stand out, as below:

The Ceanothus leaves form such an attractive triangle framing the ice particles round the developing buds.

The Gentiana flowers really stand out in these conditions. It’s good to see some strong colour at this time of year too.

Ceanothus

Gentiana

It’s been an exercise which didn’t teach me a great deal – apart from being too cocky with my lack of planning for the shooting – I’ll try harder for the assignment.

At least it’s confirmed that what I’ve been doing with my own developed workflow is acceptable. Maybe there’s hope for me yet!