Something tough about photography is choosing between similar variations of the same photo. If you’re especially shutter-happy, you might end up with many similar photos on your hard drive without a clear “best” image among them. Although you could just pick one of these photos at random, I think that it’s much better to put some thought into your decision and choose between them carefully. The small things definitely matter in photography, and this can be a golden opportunity to put your personal style into practice.
The Culling Process
There won’t always be enough differences between two photos to really matter which one you choose. If you set up on a tripod, and nothing in the photo is moving, you could take a sequence that really is identical for all intents and purposes.
However, more often than not, something will have changed between your photos. Before doing anything else, identify what those changes are. It might be as small as a blade of grass that shifted in the wind in your landscape photo, or a slightly different position of a bird’s wing in your wildlife photo. These minor differences are worth focusing on. The version of a photo that works better for you is a reflection of your unique, artistic eye as a photographer.
I don’t think that you need to approach this in a methodical or analytical way – you could just as easily approach it by feel. But if you struggle to pick between different versions of the image, following the steps below can lead you in the right direction.
- Step one: Double check the technical quality of each image. If the images are already similar, I think it makes sense to eliminate any that have technical issues. This usually comes down to things like missed focus or motion blur.
- Step two: Think about the emotional message you’re trying to convey and how well each image matches it. For example, if the emotional message is a bright, cheerful sunrise, an image where the sun is higher on the horizon could be more emotionally effective than a similar image where it’s barely peeking out.
- Step three: Scan the photos for anything that you don’t like. For example, if you have several photos at a coastline with different wave patterns, see if there are any distracting waves in one of the photos. Conversely, if there are any unique elements in one of the photos that you really enjoy, take note here.
- Step four: Revisit the remaining photos and see if any resonate with you more than the others, even if you can’t consciously identify the reason. Scroll through the photos at different speeds to gauge your initial and secondary reactions to each photo (and repeat the process on a later day). If you’re still not sure, revisit the previous steps and think about how the pros and cons of each variation affect the photo’s message.
Example One:
Let’s start by looking at an example where the two photos are pretty similar, but hardly identical. Of these two images, the second is the one I display as part of my portfolio.
Both of these photos are similar, but I strongly prefer the second one. The reason is that the emotional message is more effective in the second image (going back to “step two” of the process). This is an intense, high-contrast scene, and a sharper block of ice works better with that message than a rounded block of ice. There are other reasons why I like the second photo better, too, but none are greater than the different moods conveyed by each block of ice.
Example Two:
Next, let’s look at an example where the similarities made it tough to pick between the two images. Nevertheless, I prefer the second one again.
To see the differences more clearly, I recommend clicking the images above and scrolling between them. The most obvious change is that, in the second photo, I backed up a bit so that the plant in the foreground takes up a little less space. I think this is a good thing, because I don’t want it to outshine the mountain; they’re equally important subjects to my eye.
But there are other, subtler differences as well. For example, the mountain and plant are both a little closer to the center in the second image, so the viewer’s eye doesn’t need to jump as far between them. And – what ultimately won me over to the second image – the wind picked up, throwing more sand in the air and adding a fierce element to the middleground of the landscape. This complements the mood of the stormy sky overhead, and I think it makes the second photo more effective than the first.
Example Three:
This time, I’ll show a pair of very similar images where it was quite difficult to choose a favorite. Like before, I settled on the second photo, but it was even harder this time.
Here, the photos are so similar that it can be hard to see the differences without clicking between them. Still, after careful consideration, I landed on the second image as my preference. The reason is pretty simple – the wave pattern at the bottom of the photo allows for more of the island to be shown. In the first photo, the same area of waves is more of a distraction; it draws visual attention but doesn’t flow as nicely into the rest of the photo. The difference is definitely subtle, but often, it’s the subtle differences that matter when culling your photos.
Case Study
I’d like to end this article with a detailed case study. When I visited Yellowstone recently, the most dramatic landscape I saw was Roaring Mountain covered with vents of steam. It put on quite a show that day – I’ve visited in the past and didn’t see much “roar” at all.
I took seven different photos of Roaring Mountain as the landscape caught my eye in different ways. The photos turned out similarly, but not identically, leaving it up to me to decide on the best one. Apologies if this gets a little monotonous, but for the sake of completeness, I’ll show all seven versions below:
Step one of culling these seven photos was to check technical quality. I shot all of these images handheld on a cloudy day. My shutter speeds ranged from 1/200 to 1/250 second, which was on the edge of acceptable (given a 90mm lens without image stabilization). Handheld motion blur is usually the most significant in the corners of a photo, so I checked the corners before anything else. And indeed, one of these pictures was outside the range of acceptable sharpness. Photo #4 was eliminated from contention – here it is compared to a sharper image for reference.
Step two was to define my goal, or emotional message, with the photo. I knew that I wanted to convey the well-defined “smoke stacks” (actually steam vents) rising from the ground, giving the impression of a forest fire – yet making the viewer pause upon realizing that there are no trees on the hillside that could catch fire.
So, the best photo here would need to have well-defined steam vents rather than just a low-lying cloud or fog. Photo #6, and especially photo #5, did not fulfill this message, so I eliminated both of them from the set. Compare, for example, photo #5 versus photo #1 below:
By step three, I now had four photos with good image quality and an effective emotional message. At this point, it was time to scan each photo individually for things that I didn’t like or that bothered me in some way. In this case, something that I didn’t like about photo #7 was the large, empty area at the top left of the image. The steam was just too thick in that part of the frame. Since I wanted to convey a feeling of complexity in my photos from this landscape, I knew that I wanted an image with more positive space. A large area of negative space took away from that, so photo #7 was eliminated.
Step four was the most difficult. I liked all three remaining photos a lot, and there wasn’t much left to differentiate them. This is usually the point that I’ll just scroll through all the remaining photos at different speeds and see if something draws me toward one of them, consciously or subconsciously. For your reference, here are the three remaining images again, which happened to be the first three that I captured of the scene:
I liked different things about each photo. For photo #1, I liked the tighter pattern of steam and how it revealed more details of the surrounding mountain. For photo #2, I liked how the cloud of steam at the top followed the contours of the mountain in the middle. And for photo #3, I liked that the diagonal direction of the steam added some tension to the image.
This final phase of choosing between similar, effective image is perhaps the most important. It’s where personal style comes into play the most. Everyone can eliminate photos that have technical issues, and it’s not too hard to eliminate a photo with a muddy emotional message. But choosing between similar photos that all work well is where the art of photography really comes into play.
As I looked at these three images more, photo #1 is the one that I gravitated toward the most. I expect that different photographers with their own personal styles would have different preferences among these three photos, or maybe even prefer one that I eliminated earlier. There’s nothing wrong with that, but photo #1 ultimately resonated with me in a way the others didn’t.
In photo #1, the mirrored pillars of steam curve upward in a beautiful way, acting as a good anchor point and primary subject for the photo. The dance of the steam just felt exactly right – deliberate and harmonious. Meanwhile, the clouds of steam as a whole were smaller than in photos #2 and #3, allowing the contrast (and positive space) of the mountain to shine through. The longer that I looked at photo #1, the more emotional connection that I felt. It closely matched the way that this complex, yet harmonious landscape made me feel at the time that I was taking these photos.
So, photos #2 and #3 were eliminated, and photo #1 became my published image of this landscape.
Conclusion
One of the trickiest parts of post-processing your photography is choosing between two or more similar photos that you took. But it’s also a part of photography where creativity and personal style get to shine. There is no right answer; everyone will see it differently and have their own preferences. And that’s precisely why your choice is so important. It’s a distinct reflection of how you personally see the world.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because the photos are similar, it doesn’t matter which one you choose – it matters a great deal! The little things add up in art, and choosing between similar versions of a photo is the perfect example. I hope this article gave you some inspiration to cull through your similar photos more carefully.