Exercise: Editing

In this exercise we are tasked with taking at least 50 images of the same theme or location. I chose Airbourne, the Eastbourne Airshow. I had never taken any images of an airshow before so this was quite a challenge, so I made sure I took lots of images, 144 in total. Most of these were of the airplanes, but I also wanted to catch some of the crowds as it became clear that the shots of planes in the sky had little reference to an airshow.

Step One - The technical Edit

I also found that I had to use my largest zoom lens and panning on fast jets buzzing over the pier was also quite tricky, even with image stabilizers and  servo focus, this led to an amazing 75 of 144 images being immediately rejected. I marked these in Adobe Bridge as RED (reject). I changed the default colours and names in Bridge so that they mean more to me for EDITING under workflow.

Step Two - The Selects

Adobe Bridge also has a great filter so I can only view the labels I want to. At this stage I filtered out the rejects and labelled the remaining images as selects (YELLOW). Then going through each one I tagged those as REJECTS that were not creative or part of a series where there was a better image in the sequence. This now left me with the SELECTS tagged YELLOW.

Step Three - The First Selects

Again using Bridge to only display the Selects I then changed the images I really liked with a First Select Label or GREEN. This I found harder as it needed a good memory on what you have selected and viewed, especially out of 69 selects. This first pass has split the selects into 26 First selects and 43 selects. Now I am taking a break before continuing.....

Step Four - The Review

Reviewing the decisions made so far was not that hard. I did promote a couple of First Selects from selects but essentially everything stayed much the same.

Step Five - The final choice

This was hard. I still had 27 images to choose from but I knew I wanted one of the planes and one of people as previously mentioned to give it reference. I only had one final select of both plane and people and although not a bad image it wasn't really up to scratch so I was left with having to make individual choices.

Selecting the people shot was straight forward as there were not that many to choose from. Here is what I chose:

Selecting the plane shot was much harder. I had good shots of the Red Arrows, Spitfires and Lancasters grouped together and individual, Tornado Jets showing off their bellies, and an F16 ejecting star bursts in a vertical ascent. In the end I chose the following image as it shows great contrast of the new and the old, an Old American WWII Curtiss P40 Warhawk and a relatively modern F16 fighter, two planes for the price of one.....

The final images were cropped and slightly adjusted for tone in Photoshop.