The edit is not a technical process. It is a creative act — arguably the most important creative act in photography, because it determines what work exists in the world and what remains on a hard drive.

Most photographers edit too quickly and keep too many photographs. They review 200 frames and flag 40 because 40 of them are technically acceptable. This is not editing. This is grading. Editing is the harder work of asking which frames are actually good, not just which ones are not bad.

A useful heuristic: if you are not sure whether a photograph is good, it is not good. A genuinely good photograph produces a physical reaction — a slight quickening, a feeling that you want to keep looking. Absence of that reaction is an answer.

Practical edit workflow:

First pass: fast. Flag everything that might be good. Do not stop to consider. Trust your first response. Speed matters here — you want reaction, not analysis.

Second pass: slow. From your flagged frames, look at each one for 30 seconds. Ask: does this photograph have a reason to exist that is separate from the circumstances under which it was taken? Can it stand alone, without you explaining where you were and what was happening? If the answer is no, unflag it.

Third pass: brutal. Whatever remains after the second pass — cut it by half. You almost certainly still have too many.

The hardest thing to cut is the photograph that is nearly great. The one where something is almost right — the timing, the focus, the framing. Nearly great photographs are traps. They distract from the genuinely great ones and dilute your portfolio. Cut them.

The point: the photographers you admire selected ruthlessly. Cartier-Bresson released a few thousand photographs from a career of tens of thousands of negatives. The edit is where the work gets made.