The Dizzying of Nicole

Three images, one 2ish hour session. Some people may think it's inconceivable to only get three images in 2 hours, and others will think that 2 hours is barely enough time to nail a single concept down let alone three. The truth is I shoot hundreds of images in every session I do. 267 for this session to be exact.

I go through all those images and narrow down my favorites, in this case the field was whittled down to 44 choices - a much more manageable number. I guess I could run those 44 images through color correction, fix a couple blemishes and call it a day, a lot of photographers do just that, but that's not the way I prefer to do things. We didn't start a shoot to get a series of pretty good images, we're after that one great shot. The one that turns heads.

So I go through the smaller list of images and select my favorite favorites, and then it gets tough. When I have multiple candidates for a single concept I put them all on my screen side by side and stare. Sometimes I recruit my wife over to offer her opinion, sometimes I decide I need to combine my favorite part of each image together, and there is the rare occasion that two images from the same concept makes it through the selection process. More often than not a clear winner emerges and that winner is finished in Photoshop. After all, pushing the button on the camera creates only a rough draft of the image at very best, at least that's my opinion.

And in the end, I hope that all the mosquito bites, all of the slivers, all of the back road driving, gray-line trespassing, and making poor Nicole spin until she almost fell over was worth the effort. In some cases hope is not necessary, sometimes the photos turn out beyond even my expectations... this was one of those occasions. You gotta love this stuff!