New Portrait Shoot and More Editing Advice

All right, here's some new portrait work, I know I'm on a roll! This work features the wonderful Jill Green back for her second shoot with me. Jill's a great subject once she gets into the groove, but that also means I have to shoot a lot of images to capture those awesome images. I'm not complaining, it's time well spent in the studio. This time though I may have shoot too much cause I ended up with a huge file full of favourites, 27 to be exact. My editing process goes as such, group the photos together by type, like full body, mid-shots and close up for example. Then I proceed to find the similar images in those groupings, the best poses stay, the others go into a "No" folder, there not bad, so I'm not just going to delete them. In fact I don't delete anything, my raw images get backed-up and stored on an external hard drive, this way I'll always have them just in case. You might not want to use an image for your website, but the person might really want that picture, take this one for example:

I'm not going to use it on my site, but it feature's Jill's new tattoo, so I know she'll most likely want at least this digital copy, so I put it here in my blog for her. Sometimes I'll see an image that's awesome, I love it, but it doesn't fit with the thematic flow on my site, or represent the person in the image very much at all. I still want to keep it and have a good print version saved on my computer and backed up in the external hard drive and eventually a disc. This image here makes her look really depressed, I cropped with a lot of negative space so she looked very lonely. 

It's a very compelling image on it's own, but doesn't represent her personality, which is what my portrait work is about. This I probably wouldn't even post on here normally, but rather keep it in case an idea for a series came into my mind at a later date and time. The next step is boiling down to no more then 10 solid images for the blog and then a top 3 for my website, that's the guideline I'm going by now. It forces you to really think and pick the most compelling work in your mind. Every photographer I know of does this process, some more then others, but it should become second nature after a while. Anyway, here are the top picks for the blog, the first 3 are the website pics, and thanks again Jill.

P.S.  - Rain really sucks sometimes 

-Larry M. Holder