3 Tips on how to select your favorite images to go inside your album!
3 Tips on how to select your favorite images to go inside your album!
I know that selecting images can be a huge pain point for my clients, so I’ve decided to write some of my thoughts down to hopefully make it slightly easier. These tips will hopefully make selecting your images a little easier if you’ve purchased an album with your session. If you’re selecting them for wall art or even a folio box, the process is still similar (see #1) but you’d probably have a different final criteria.
3 Tips on selecting your images for your keepsake album
First and foremost, abandon all the noise. Get rid of the criticism and try to see the images objectively. Now look at them and tell me how they make you FEEL when you see them. There’s going to be pictures that show up that move you, that remind you of a part of yourself you love or maybe have never seen portrayed on camera before. Maybe it makes you feel happy or maybe it makes you feel a deep sense of love for the woman you see before you. Let your emotions guide your decisions because there’s a good chance those pictures will make you feel that way every single time you see them.
If you are getting an album with your session, then we start getting down to some technical ways to narrow it down. Imagine them like spreads of a magazine that you open up and lay flat on the table. If you couple two of the same look together you can put one on each side, so a good way to go about your selections is to choose them in pairs/even numbers for each look. The exception is when you have a STELLAR laying down pose or impactful horizontal image that you could envision as a full spread (one image taking up two pages horizontally). Then you can pick your two from the look to go on their own pages, and a third from the same look as a spread on its own page (or 4-5 images of the same look, etc.)
If you want to get a little more technical with those paired images, you can aim for uniquely different poses in each one or if it’s a similar/same pose select a close up crop and a far away crop to pair with it, or a detail shot with a full image. You can also select one where you’re looking at the camera and another where you’re looking away to go alongside it.
Ultimately, the selection process is a personal decision and at the end of the day, if it checks the first box and none of the other boxes, it’s a keeper. The point of photography is so much more than just technically curated imagery, it’s about forever encapsulating a version of yourself that you’ll only ever be in this very moment. Choose the ones that make you FEEL something, the rest is secondary.