Passenger Seat: Creating a Photographic Project from Conception through Execution in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Chapter 12. Editing and Culling Images

Patience is not simply the ability to wait—it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

—JOYCE MEYER

Have you ever had a session where every image you captured was exactly as you envisioned? Me neither. Culling the winners from the also-rans is inevitable. In the Passenger Seat project, because the ratio of good images to bad was really pitiful, I knew that I would be deleting the majority of images that I made—thousands of blurred, boring, or improperly exposed images that were basically too flawed to be useful for any reason—because I prefer not to waste hard drive space with images I know I’m never going to use.

Some photographers have no problem deleting images; others never delete a single file. It’s a personal ...