Best of 2017

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.

  1. 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)
  2. exclude all “holiday snap shots”, selfies and the like. This reduced the selection to about 200
  3. 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:
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Then it got really, really difficult. I removed those which I thought just don’t have any “umpf” for me. Down to 18.
  7. 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)