Exercise 4: Editing

For this exercise I wanted to apply what I had learned about workflow, selecting images and editing to a real life assignment rather than something I had come up with myself.

The opportunity for this came up when my cousin asked me to take some photographs for his wedding. The only brief I was given was to take a number of group family shots after the service, apart from that I said I would take a number of pictures with the view to covering the day.

The day after the wedding when I downloaded the images I was struck by a sense of purpose that I do not usually feel - I mostly photograph for myself either pursuing personal projects or taking images of my family and children. Because of this I often suffer from not editing my images properly: I have files of hundreds of pictures on my hard drive which are either not started or only partially completed in the editing process. As I discussed earlier I think a remedy to this is to have an output source for my pictures. For this project I needed to select the best images from the shoot, edit in Lightroom and Photoshop, print the best images and produce a photobook to show the narrative of the couples wedding day.

Stats:

1171 photographs taken in total

Technical Edit:

697 Selects

38 Deselects

Approach - I examined each photograph one by one in Lightroom and selected with a flag images I wanted to explore further. Images that did not strike me as selects were not chosen (for example compositionally not very interesting) images that had obvious technical issues were flagged as deselects.

First Selects:

468 one star or higher

352 two stars or higher

208 three stars or higher

75 four stars or higher

Approach - I examined each selected image in more detail, removing the flag if the picture did not hit the mark technically and/or compositionally. I then edited each image in Lightroom - adjusting crop, white balance, exposure, contrast and saturation as necessary. To aid further selection I rated each image. As mentioned previously, I mainly use rating as a way of indicating that I have edited an image. I rate images with 3 stars to denote 'average' using 2 stars to indicate an image with something of interest but also some sort of flaw and 4 stars to show above average. I never rate images with 5 stars at this point as I believe you need time to decide which images are the absolute best and also because the highest available rating is not something I wish to overuse.

At the same time as rating images I selected images I wanted to print with a blue label.

Output for print (blue label):

205

For the final stage of the process I had 6x4 prints made of the 205 images I had selected for printing. The main output for the couple was to be a 100 page photobook. I find that seeing an image printed greatly aids selection at this point, with individual prints it is also useful to be able to move them around and play with the order or place pictures side by side to decide on alternatives. For the photobook I wanted to feature the images in chronological order to show the events of the day as they happened so choices were mainly based around alternatives for similar shots.

Producing these images for someone else combined with the pictures being of such an important occasion for the couple was quite stressful. In the end I know my final selection of 468 images that I gave to the couple on cd is too many - my reasons for including this many is that I wanted them to have as many pictures of their day as I could give. I ended up spending so much time looking at, pondering over, selecting and editing the pictures that I eventually found it very difficult to be objective. I do not know how much this feeling is driven by my relationship with the bride and groom and by knowing many of the guests. I wonder if I would have found editing the images easier if they were less well known to me? On reflection I should have asked for feedback and advice more - I pretty much made all decisions about which images to select and which to choose for the photobook by my self. Asking someone else may have been of great benefit, perhaps I should have asked the couple for their opinion about which pictures they wanted to include in the album? The biggest mistake I made however was taking too long to complete my edit. I really need to find a strategy to complete work quicker and recognise the distractions that prevent me from doing this.

Zack Arias Blog: Editing Your Porfolio

I came across this photographer and his blog via a forum post on the OCA student website:

http://oca-student.com/node/82174

As part of a discussion about workflow, Nigel Monckton provides the link:

http://zackarias.com/editorial-photography/editing-your-portfolio/

At the time I read this I was researching workflow and image editing as part of the early exercises in DPP. The piece hit a particular nerve with me because of this. Most other writing I had come across in reference to workflow I found quite dull and uninspiring as they deal with the 'nuts and bolts' of the process. Martin Evening discusses various strategies in 'Lightroom 3 for Photographers' and hints at his own workflow but eventually arrives at few conclusions - an indication that there is not a 'one size fits all' approach.

What I like about Arias' blog post is that he is unapologetically personal in his tone and extremely open and honest. Procrastination and self doubt (something I am extremely familiar with) are themes he repeatedly touches on. He talks about "kick[ing] the demons out of your head and get[ting] to work" ,because, "It’s never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be finished. It’s never going to be ready. If you wait until you are ready you’ll never accomplish a thing. Ever." I find the knowledge that a successful professional photographer has the same feelings of the work not being good enough that I do extremely reassuring.

I also like the way he discusses editing and photographic skills and the need to continually revisit your work: "You not only grow as a photographer but you grow as a photo editor in your life." This is a feeling echoed by OCA tutor Clive White in the forum discussion: "I still come across images that I shot and discarded 30 years ago that make a different sense to me now." This is very much my view and it is good to see it reaffirmed - simply, storing digital images takes up very little physical space and extra storage is extremely cheap nowadays so why would you not want to keep everything? Of course, the trick is being able to access this again - hundreds of MBs worth of image files that are not labelled in any way are just as unwieldy as piles of boxes of random prints.

At the point Arias culls his original 'big edit' down to the final 10% he makes prints so he can view them physically and most importantly explore their relationship with each other. This is a process I also find extremely beneficial and it can be surprising how much your opinions can change when faced with a physical print rather than an image on a screen.

I will leave the last word with Leopin, the OCA student who originated the discussion, as he ponders why there is so little written material on workflow since this is such an important part of the photographic process: "What shall I conclude? That it is a process too subjective, too intimate, too private to be disclosed openly?" I think he could be right in many ways and again I applaud the bravery of Arias to publish his ways of working in such an honest way. I think the majority of photographers would struggle with being this honest fearing self doubt shows some sort of weakness. Maybe there is also an element of not wanting to be challenged as well - OCA tutor Jose Navarro discusses his workflow in very practical terms on the forum, and while I very much respect his views and appreciate his ways of working would be highly tried and tested, his is not a system I would employ myself…..knowing about how he works does help me however.

"Its all in the edit (delete at your peril)" by John Macpherson on duckrabbit blog

I came across this article via twitter before starting DPP and when I was looking through my twitter feed realised it had a lot of relevance to the initial exercises of the course concerned with workflow and editing.

The piece was posted on Duckrabbitblog on 25th January 2012 by photographer and photography teacher John Macpherson. I like the open and personal tone of the piece in which Macpherson discusses what he believes to be the potential mistake of photographers deleting pictures in the field alongside his experiences of tutoring novice photographers.

He begins by explaining how he tries "to encourage a process of editing images on the computer"…."just like the contact sheets we used to make in the good old film days." He continues, "for many inexperienced photographers it’s actually quite difficult to determine what actually constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ image and that too often its the technical qualities that are the defining ones, overriding any other less tangible considerations."

He follows this with an anecdote of how one of his students failed to see the potential of one of her shots and apologised for not having deleted it at the time because it was "not sharp." Macpherson's experience and visual knowledge however told him differently -  to him the image was evocative and the lack of sharpness made the image timeless with a certain amount of 'emotional content.' This led him to conclude, "taking ‘good’ images is very easy, but the difficulty is that they are invariably surrounded by a mass of work of lesser value. How does one discern the good from bad? If you’re a novice photographer how can you tell the difference? I often wonder how many real gems never see the light of day because they are simply deleted?"

Another anecdote concerning a discussion about a students image that to her represented something very negative, (a photograph of her partners damaged leg after a serious accident which meant they were separated by hundreds of miles while he recuperated.) After discussion it was agreed that her feelings were based on the emotional force she placed on the picture and that disregarding this and focussing on the pictures actual content could lead to a very different reading -  that the image actually represents tenderness, caring and healing. After the discussion the woman changes her opinion which to Macpherson shows the importance of sharing your work:

"I think its vital that you share your work with people you know. Discussing why it was made, and what it makes you feel like, is a hugely valuable thing to do. It’s an even more valuable thing to do with people you don’t know, because they’re less likely to care about offending you by saying they don’t like a particular image."

After the article, in the comments section, Macpherson touches on a particular issue connected with digital photography - the ability to take hundreds of pictures at a time. He states that "It took me literally years to learn to ‘read’ and properly understand images in the editing process. It really is a skill to develop, separate from the button pressing that creates images." And on the subject of being able to "shoot 10 frames a second [and] to come back from an event with a huge amount of material" he adds this note of caution:

"[it's] a painful job if you want to consider every single frame, check the expressions on faces, where eyes are looking, all the little details that can make or break an image. I think a lot of people lose a lot of work because they just don’t have the time to carefully edit, and they probably miss some useful work. I know I’ve come across little gems I missed first, second and third time around because there was so much other stuff."

Lots of interesting food for thought for me in this article - I never delete images from my memory card (so a tick for me there!) but I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that my ability to edit successfully is something I need to work hard at. Often I am consumed with self doubt and disappointment when reviewing images. I have tried various strategies to combat this - editing as soon as possible after a shoot (which is not always practical) and also leaving a bit of time between shooting and editing as I sometimes find the cushion of time can help me be more objective about the images. The advice to seek feedback about images is one I will try to incorporate for example actively seeking feedback through Flickr. The problem with this however is that a certain amount of editing is required which does not eliminate the problem of good images being lost and not being selected at all. My overall feeling is that I need to create a schedule for both shooting and editing - I tend to have intense periods when I take a large amount of photographs which is often punctuated with inactivity. I need to arrive at a better strategy for managing my time which pushes me to photograph more regularly, however, this also needs to be reinforced with robust editing and taking my pictures to some sort of output - even if this is just posting on Flickr.