Sifting and selecting - work in progress

As part of the #abundantartshow, I'm supposed to post a behind the scenes of a work in progress. So that got me thinking. How does a photographer show a work in progress? I am not in the habit of showing un-edited digital photos, and to be honest, I'm not working on a shoot at the moment. My film photos involve me going to places, taking film images, sending them off for development and then getting them scanned, returned and looking at them, and deciding what to share. So how am I supposed to complete this assignment? This week, it's the end of the year, and I shot a lot of photos. I just happen to also have some portfolio showings in January, so I decided to update my physical portfolio with this year's photos.

So here you have it. Behind the scenes, working in Adobe Lightroom!

What a task. 1,409 five star photos in my editorial catalog alone! (The five stars are the one I consider for submission to the client.)  And I've also got 3 architectural catalogs, a commercial catalog, a portrait catalog and an equine catalog. I like to keep different types of photos in different catalogs, and archive them at the end of the year, creating a new catalog for each type of photography every year. Sometimes, if I fill a catalog, I will archive it early, which I did 3 times for architecture. And, holy wow, I shot a LOT in 2016! 

Of course, most of the photos in my physical portfolio will match my website, since those have already been selected as the awesomest, but finding them on my various hard drives and exporting the selected photos at print resolution is a time consuming job. And of course the indecision doesn't help - I inevitably find at least 3 more photos from the project that I think would also work quite nicely, so then I end up exporting all of them. Fortunately, my favorite art director/husband will be helping me select the final images tonight. He is quite good at choosing the images that speak the loudest.

You'd think a Virgo would enjoy this more, but I must admit, it is not nearly as fun as pixel peeping and editing my images into perfection, then flipping back and forth between the original file and the edited version and patting myself on the back. Anyway, I am quite effectively procrastinating by writing this post and should probably get back to work!