So - late night a bit of an explanation for why I keep going back to these.
I rank pictures in shoots... on a scale of 1 to 6 stars. There are 14 pictures in my entire career I have rated "6 stars" - only 3 or 4 of those are up on DA.
I consider a shoot good if I get half a dozen 4 stars -- and if there is a 5 stars in there, wow, I am happy -- I might get half a dozen 5 star images in an entire year if I am lucky.
"blurch" photos get auto deleted, no star rankings... you know, dropped the camera, took a picture of my foot, the model was picking her nose, bad blinky... et
1 star photos, which means "crappy lighting" get deleted as well -- unless I think the pose is so exceptional, I don't mind spending 2 hours in PS to try to fix it. But usually, nah.
2 star photos I keep around -- because sometimes I am off my game or the model isn't very good so I need something to work on, or I else I use them as a "base" from which to rank other photos.
3 star photos often get edited -- unless it is a particularly great shoot and I don't have time to get to them all. I am pretty happy if a shoot has 50% 3 star images. Very Happy!
On a 6 hour shoot (I work slow because of health), I typically take 350 photos before I call it a day. On a great shoot... the rules get thrown out.
This image here is a from a shoot with THREE - 6 star photos, nearly ten - 5 star photos, well over a hundred 4 star photos, and hundreds and hundreds of 3 star images.
This was back in the days when I had some tiny semblance of health left. It was a shoot that was so epic, it started on a Saturday morning with Anastasia and I "experimenting" with light and poses... and then we fell into the shoot, we got lost as muse and photographer, and when it was all said and done, we were finally drained late on Sunday night -- we had knocked out nearly two thousand photos. Did we really do that? Yea, shot pictures for 2 days straight, stopping only to sleep -- or to grab a bit to eat. It was just one of those eras, where I was trying new lighting and the model was extremely emotional -- which was rare for her, she is normally so unflappable and intellectual, there was just something about that weekend that was magic. We were totally in sync, as if we had telepathy when it came to the next shot.
To this day it remains one of my "greatest shoots of all time" -- days like this you can only dream of as an artist. The shoot is pretty much an "evergreen" and I will be plucking photo's from it for the rest of my life. Also, there really isn't much editing involved so it's just a matter of resizing the images and converting them to BW.
![:)]( ":) (Smile)")
And now you know the rest of the story.
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