my top 16
I took inspiration from Martin Bailey’s annual “top ten” process to go through all my 2017 pictures and choose the best ones. I decided to select a total of 16, eight in black an white and eight in colour.
selection process
I organize all photos and videos in Adobe Lightroom for a number of years already. So it is the easiest was to do this journey in Lightroom.
- choose all pictures taken in 2017. Total # of frames 1340. The total count in LR was 1500, the difference is made up by pictures taken by other people that I store with permission (eg a purchase)
- exclude all “holiday snap shots”, selfies and the like. This reduced the selection to about 200
- remove photos which are “nice to look at” (whatever that means…), but have some other flaws. For instance, disturbing elements that I didn’t want or cannot remove.. This got me down to app 55 frames.These are the 55 chosen ones at step 3:
- Then it got difficult. First, I removed either the BW or the Color pictures for those where I kept both in the 55 list above. That got me down to about 30.
- Then I removed photos where the initial “yes” turned out to be more of a “wow that was a great filter effect”. Down to about 24.
- Then it got really, really difficult. I removed those which I thought just don’t have any “umpf” for me. Down to 18.
- Then I asked my two trusted in-house experts for their choice, i.e. they helped me to eliminate two more.
AND HERE WE ARE – THE FINAL 16
oooofff, that was really, really, really difficult and such a pleasure to do!
I will go through each image in detail in a few separate blog posts, providing some thoughts about each image and some technical considerations (camera, settings, post processing)