I visited a friend for a while ago. He’s going to write some text for my book, so I gave him a CD with photos I’m going to use so that he knows the content. We had a cup of coffee and sat by his computer. He showed me some of his latest shots and then we looked through the photos I brought. There was 33 of them.

After browsing through he was silent for a moment and then asked me aquestion.

How can you choose thirty images?

He has probably thousands of images on his computer and said that it feels almost impossible for him to choose couple of dozen from there. My answer?

I don’t know… By feel, I guess.

The background: I’m image editor, photojournalist. I make maybe 20-40 decisions of what image to use, every single day I’m on shift. That is published images, which means that the material I look through consists probably hundreds of images – or hours of video feed, mostly looked through with ff.

So, it’s my job to make choises, I am a professional chooser. And can’t give better answer how I do it. I stopped to think about that in that evening.

I’ve done that for almost ten years now, so of course I have quite strong routine, I don’t have to think how to make choices. It’s buried so deep in my spine or back of my head or somewhere.

But I tried to analyze a bit to be able to give my friend something better than I don’t know. I think it’s almost impossible for me too to choose 30 images from base of several hundred or more. Instead I suggest picking one idea, then choosing one image to fit that idea. That’s much easier. Repeat; one idea, one image, repeat again.

When there is beginning of collection, let’s say 5-7 images, it’s time to stop and look what you’ve got. And then pick next idea from those images – it’s easier than from the scratch. Repeat and repeat again.

Soon you notice you really have picked thirty images. Job done.