How do you do it?

[BabyHopes]

How do you narrow your shots down to your final slideshow selections?

Because I'm staring at close to 150 images (down from 200, which was down from almost 300) of my sister's labor and I can't figure out how to get it narrowed down any further! She labored for over 44 hours, so I had LOTS of opportunity to shoot the birth.

I wanted the slideshow to follow the storyline of the birth, but now I'm wondering if I need to just forget that idea and pick the very cream of the crop. She got in and out of the birth tub a number of times, so do I just group the best water-labor shots together? Or keep things in order? Which means there are a couple water labor shots, followed by some laboring on the bed, then back in the water... (making sense?)

I've been working at this for almost two hours now and the slideshow is still almost six minutes long! (I'm trying to get it closer to three minutes, four if I have to.)

Any suggestions on how I should do this?

[Daniel Bates]

Are any of your 150 images close duplicates of each other? For example, I often take several images that all tell the same story (perhaps with slightly different framing or positioning or what have you). If you can eliminate those, the slideshow will move much faster and will have more impact. Repetition is dilution...

[texxter]

I normally follow an iterative approach with my editing. I start with a number of images I want to keep, say 10. Then I use Lightroom editing tools to mark with stars each image. I start giving 1 star to all the ones I want to look at again. I repeat the process and select the best of the 1 star images and tag them as 2 stars. I keep doing this until I have just the few I want. May sound laborious, but it's not - it's systematic but you have to be ruthless. Pick only the very best, and don't use variations of the same image, all final images should be different in some significant way.

I normallly go from a card (300 raw images) to a top-10 in about 30 minutes with a clear head and a quick finger.

Good luck.

[BabyHopes]

Originally Posted by texxter

I normally follow an iterative approach with my editing. I start with a number of images I want to keep, say 10. Then I use Lightroom editing tools to mark with stars each image. I start giving 1 star to all the ones I want to look at again. I repeat the process and select the best of the 1 star images and tag them as 2 stars. I keep doing this until I have just the few I want. May sound laborious, but it's not - it's systematic but you have to be ruthless. Pick only the very best, and don't use variations of the same image, all final images should be different in some significant way.

I normallly go from a card (300 raw images) to a top-10 in about 30 minutes with a clear head and a quick finger.

Good luck.

This is fantastic advice. Now, to execute it...

Okay, I'm going to head back to Lightroom. I think the real key really is in the statement, "repetition is dilution." I'm going to have to just keep telling myself that, over and over and over. ;)

[CaptainTom]

If the image needs to be seen in sequence with another image in order to tell the story, it can be edited out. Each image should stand on its own and tell a story. Of course, there are always exceptions , but this is another editing technique you can apply to all the ones mentioned already.