Last week’s blog discussed the merits of having an ongoing project to choose your Top 12 photos for the year. This week’s blog is short how-to guide for this kind of project.

How can you do this?

The essential issue here is to have a collection point of candidate photos that you can get back to. Because I use my iPad to manage my photos, my collection point is an Album that is simply titled 2020 Top Twelve. My workflow with a memory card starts with a download to my iPad. I go through the images and ruthlessly delete most of them. It is psychologically easy for me to do this, because the memory card still has every image that will eventually be downloaded to Lightroom. I post process in Snapseed, make the final decisions about what I will keep on my iPad and then choose the best of the lot to go into the 2020 Top Twelve album. For the first couple of months of the year, I will not review the album. But as the year goes on, I will start paring the album down. I do not want more than 50 images to choose from at the end of the year. For street photographers there is an argument for eventually having two albums of 12 photos: one for b&w and one for color.

Where this system breaks down for me is the pictures I take on my iPhone. I am reluctant to so ruthlessly delete them from my iPad because once they are gone, they are gone! Now I transfer them to a desktop file outside of Lightroom using the app PhotoSync. When that is done I can ruthlessly cull out the images on my iPad. All of the pictures eventually end up in Lightroom. It is a database that can manage large numbers of photo files. By the way, my collection of top 12 could be there instead of on my iPad. I could use the star rating system or a keyword or I could form a collection in Lightroom.

The making final choices can be difficult.

When you have your year-end collection of 50 or so candidates, the real work begins. Let’s face it, each of these pictures is your baby. And they are not just a baby, but a favorite baby. You are going to have to kill some of the babies. One suggestion for choosing is to adapt the old school technique of looking at contact sheets. If you look at digital thumbnails of your photos, it will help you evaluate the quality of their composition.

Top 2019 Candidate: Street reflection in Voss, Norway.

I have even progressed to printing my final candidates, although it is not a particularly easy task for me. Right now I have 31 candidates. I plan to have a Top 12 in color and a Top 12 in b&w, so I need to eliminate 7, as it turns out all in color. So far I have printed 6 in color and 6 in b&w. The remainder have to be printed in another lab that has the right aspect. In 2020, I plan to print images as soon as I add them to my 2020 Top 12 collection. Being able to hold the prints and rearrange them in groups has been something of a revelation to me.

Get an outside opinion

I was listening to a Candid Frame Podcast where Sebastian Meyer was being interviewed on how he selected prints for his book, Under Every Yard of Sky. “[It] is a photography book about modern Iraqi Kurdistan that weaves together a decade of Meyer’s reporting with his personal story of friendship and loss.” Three editors and three outside photographers made choices from 500 4x6 photos by signing the back of any picture that they thought was a candidate to be included in the book. The signatures were tallied and that tally identified the pictures that resonated and the ones that did not. Sebastian was surprised by some that resonated and heartbroken that some did not.

Top 2019 Candidate: Wynwood Walls in Miami.

In a similar vein, Eric Kim talks about 1 +3. The premise is that if three other photographers that you respect say it belongs in your Top 12, then it belongs.

Because I have prints, I can ask friends and family to choose their favorites by signing on the back. I have done this once when visiting NYC and it worked exactly like I wanted it to. It was so clear to me what should be in and what should be out.

Another way to get an outside opinion, if you have posted on Instagram during the year, is to get a collage of your top 9 most liked Instagram posts. You can do this by downloading the app Top Nine from the Apple store or Google Play. I do not necessarily think Instagram-likes are a good barometer for the quality of a photo, but they can certainly provide a viewpoint of how an image is received.

When I was looking at the color prints of my 2019 Top 12, I was quite surprised and pleased how these four photographs sequenced. I think there is a real project here for me to develop.

Exercise

Think about where you can collect your best photos this year.

Dedicated to Street

This Year Choose Your Top 12 Photos - Part 2