I've been asked to present a show at a gallery this fall, which puts me in every photographer's dilemma - how do you take 35-years of photography and boil it down to twenty or fewer pictures?

We all know we should have a collection of our best images. But how many of us keep that up to date? How regularly do we add to it, and more importantly, how often do we take away those photos that no longer belong there?

Since I teach workflow (a lot) I'm happy to say that I am actually pretty well organized. My "Best of" collections break down into the before-digital era (film), the early digital era (ugly) and the current (good) digital era, which for me started in 2000. My career was primarily photojournalism from 1976 to 2001, and then changed to include fine art, travel, landscape and wildlife photography.

I started by going through those collections and pulling my all-time favorites. That totaled about 200 images. Then the culling process began. It took me about two hours, start to finish, to pull all the images I was interested in, then get that group down to around 30.

At that point I simply took my favorites and started printing. I used a combination of Nikon's Capture NX and Photoshop, and an Epson 4800 printer. Working with roll paper, I'd first make a test strip, check the sharpening and color from it, then print two or three final copies (in case one was damaged at some point). I settled on a canvas size of 16 X 20. The finished file was saved as is to make it easy to reproduce any image at a later date.

The whole printing process took about three days, making the prints while working on other projects on the computer. The toughest part? Some of my early newspaper work only exists as 11 X 14 prints. I'd already scanned them (in sections on a flatbed scanner, then put them together in Photoshop), but there was a lot of touchup work to do, using the Healing Brush to remove scratches and other marks.

One reason I agreed to do the show was that it would be the incentive I needed to get that collection up to date and printed. And it worked. If you want to see what I settled on, feel free to visit www.reedhoffmann.com/Career.