peripheral vision

Hoo boy did I experience some major blogger’s remorse last night. I had another look at the photos I was talking about and decided they were all crap and I was stupid to think they might make an interesting collection and there was no way I could meet the expectations I’d just set. I think the self-doubt was triggered in part by this article and its suggestion that maybe all the photos you’re trying to edit suck. This morning, however, was a new day, and I think it’s still worth exploring the possibilities.

So I’m still trying to figure out an effective workflow for editing these photos. Tonight I cracked open Lessons in DLSR Workflow with Lightroom and Photoshop by Jerry Courvoisier, which I picked up at the library a couple of weeks ago. I thought it might have some good ideas. Sure enough, there it was on page 44: “Tough Decisions: The Editing Process.” Now, I have no doubt that as I get further on, this book will yield great ideas and lessons, but I disagree with pretty much everything he has to say about deleting photos, and not just because I’m a hardcore pack rat with a fondness for the underdog.

He suggests the following criteria “to start the editing process:

• Clarity: can you tell what the subject is? Is the image blurry from camera shake?
• Tilt: Is your photo tilted or level? (This can be adjusted through cropping.) Unusual angles can in some cases present a new perspective or introduce tension for the viewer – maybe good, maybe not.
• Soft focus: Depends if you were after this effect. Sharp focus is overrated in some cases. Motion blur and dragging the shutter as a technique are often experimental techniques and require close examination.
• Severe underexposure or overexposure: Too much noise in underexposure is not good unless used deliberately as a creative effect. Extremely blown out highlights can’t be recovered.
• People’s emotions and expressions: Does the picture communicate a feeling you like? Are the faces expressive? Backs of heads do not engage the viewer unless artistically placed within the frame.
• Composition: Poorly framed images? Delete in cases where the images cannot be improved with cropping. Delete most pictures with people running out of the frame, with middle horizon lines (remember the Rule of Thirds), and with subjects in the centre.
• Poor selection of point of focus: Focus point distracting? Delete.
• Reflections that interfered with subject.
• Too many similar images when shooting a series of sequences.
• Too many frames with the same perspective on the same subject.
• Experiments that just don’t work visually.”

Now, I’m all for selecting the best photos and ignoring the others. I do it every time I upload photos to my computer. And those are even good criteria to start thinking about. But deleting a photo just because it doesn’t follow the Rule of Thirds? I don’t agree with that at all. But then, I’ve always believed that rules were made to be broken. And I think that we can often have unconscious intentions we’re not aware of until after the fact. Just because a photo didn’t meet your conscious intention doesn’t mean it doesn’t do something else equally or perhaps even more valuable.

I almost never delete photos. Not when they’re blurry or tilted or didn’t capture what I intended. I might delete near-duplicates, but then my pack-ratness usually kicks in and I just can’t bear to. More and more I think this is a very good idea. I find more and more that the further I get away from shooting an image, the more able I am to really judge its merit. And sometimes photos that I originally rejected turn out to be some of my favourites. For example, all of these photos were rejects on the first past for at least one of the reasons Courvoisier cited.

These photos I shot all on the same January day, and I came home cold, discouraged and frustrated that nothing seemed to work. Now I quite like the bleakness and geometry:

This one, one of only a very few I shot in District Six in Cape Town, I rejected because of the tilt, and because the frame cut part of one boy’s foot off (it was a drive-by shooting). But now this remains one of my very favourite of the whole trip.

I could go on, but I think you get the drift. Hard drive space is relatively inexpensive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 7:50 am and is filed under books, it IS all about me!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.