I’m not great at self-editing so I’ve really struggled whittling down almost 60 images from some time I spent with CINI, an Indian charity that works to combat rural child malnutrition, to 10-15.
The problem is not that I think all my pictures are great…far from it. It’s just that choosing which ones work together as some sort of reportage or narrative has been really difficult.
This exercise is only for a pretty basic course I’m doing – City and Guilds level two – but I’m viewing it as good training and if it made sense it could be possible to use the project as part of a portfolio to take this stuff further. So the whole thing has been hurting my brain slightly.

So from the 300 or so images I shot over the course of a day spent at a children’s clinic and malnutrition emergency ward, I got just under 60 of the stronger ones printed up to help me decide what to keep – it’s easier to look at them side by side than flick through them on a screen.
The that was immediately evident was that most had printed far too dark, despite some basic post production, so I think I need to make calibrating my computer monitor a priority.
My production skills are fairly limited to say the least but I think the images I’ve selected definitely need a good bit more work.
I’ve tried to get rid of repetition wherever possible and to be ruthless about eliminating images that don’t really add to the flow of the series or tell you anything about what this centre does. But it’s so hard to give a set a sense of place, some context, some detail and everything else in such a small number of shots.

I’m not sure if I’ve made the right choices or whether they work together as a whole and I am struggling to make a final choice between two (first column, overlapping on the middle row). I can’t imagine what it must be like for a professional, having to ruthlessly go through thousands of images of which the vast majority would be very strong. It really is an art…respect is due.