Before January wraps up and we move forward into 2022, I wanted to share a quick idea that was passed on to me in the Photofocus community: Compiling your annual best images and saving them for future-self critique.
Compiling your annual best images
At the end of every year, social media platforms are covered in “best-of” posts. These posts are where people share their best work from the year previous. I personally enjoy partaking in this trend. It’s a great time to go through your images and pull together a small portfolio of work from the year that was. It’s cause for reflection on a year of creating; a way to critique your own work and growth as a photographer.
It’s also a way to celebrate images that you’re proud of and share them with your community.
While commenting on one such post, I had a community member mention that he takes these posts one step further. He puts the images into a folder labeled with the year number and saves them. As he’s been doing this for a number of years, he stated that each year he could now go through the folders of “best-of” images and critique his progress on an annual basis.
Organize and file
I thought this was a great strategy. To complete this, I simply went into Lightroom and created a Collection Set called “Yearly Bests.” Within that, I created a Collection called “2021,” to which I added my favorites from last year. It only took a few minutes and I plan to continue doing so every year now.
If you’re not a Lightroom user, you can save and organize your yearly favorites in whatever manner that best fits your workflow.
Of course, we can always look back on our work over time. But I like the idea of having quick access to my annual best images. Years from now it will be a great way to take stock of my progress over time. And even from year to year, I look forward to comparing images that I considered my best at the time.
Will they still stand the test of time, or had I chosen them because I was still emotionally attached to the experience of creating them? Is my style or subject matter going to change? Will advances in technology change how I take images?
Only time will tell! But I look forward to having these quick reference folders at my disposal.
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