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.