decay # 10 ~ Kent, the plate and floor are back + more POD stuff
Monday, February 18, 2008 at 04:20PM 
Assortment of decay • click to embiggenA question about the most daunting challenge of making a book from Tom Gallione; How about a little advice on editing? I have a project with far too many images ... I'm struggling to cut the portfolio to under 100 ... Beyond the obvious guidelines, i.e. only show your best work and ideas relating to whether or not an image fits in with the theme reflected in the statement, can you offer any advice?
Editing your own body of work down to just a select few pictures - to even as many as 100 out of a very large body - is a daunting and sometimes exasperating task. Most photographers have an 'attachment' of one kind or another to all of those pictures they have designated as 'keepers'.
At the very least, there was a reason why the pictures were created in the first place, not to mention the work invested after picturing to make prints (even if you only viewed them on-screen). It's only natural to like them all ... but, truth be told, they are not all 'winners'.
The only way I have been able to figure out the winners from the also-rans is to make prints and see if the 'magic' is still there. I find that the key to judging your own work is to clear your head of all the whys, hows, what-fors, and where-with-alls and just look at the pictures as if you were seeing them for the first time.
This is not the easiest thing to do, but it can be done. Repeated viewing of the pictures over time seems to help cool your memory / emotion of and for the making process and focus it on the thing you have created. Again, over time, some pictures just seem to seem better and better while others seem less so by comparison. "Less so" does not mean 'bad' - the 'cream' just separates and rises to the top.
DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS ON A MONITOR. MAKE PRINTS. The prints should be small work prints that you can literally throw into piles - 1 marked IN, the other marked OUT. Live with the results for awhile (repeated viewing) and rearrange as needed.
Caveat; YOU WILL NEVER BE COMPLETELY SATISFIED WITH THE SELECTION. NEVER, EVER. There will always be doubts and what-ifs, but, if you ever want to end the editing process, the key will be to figure how to handle and live with the doubts.
Reader Comments (1)
Thanks Mark. This certainly seems to be good advice and I have already seen how certain images, over time, lose their "magic" as prints.