Advertisement
Advertisement
Read Next
Photo Of The Day By Stan Bysshe
Today’s Photo Of The Day is “Noisy...Abstract Wildlife Assignment Winner Christopher Baker
Congratulations to Christopher Baker...Photo Of The Day By Tom Elenbaas
Today’s Photo Of The Day is...Photo Of The Day By Harry Lichtman
Today’s Photo Of The Day is “Spring...Advertisement
Featured Articles
Read More
Revealing The Invisible
Infrared photography opens the door to a new way of seeing.
Read More
Camera Settings For Wildlife Photography
How to choose the right combination of exposure settings for the situation.
Read More
Photographing A Scientific Expedition
For the photo adventure of a lifetime, use your skills to help document a scientific expedition.
Read More
How To Plan A Milky Way Photo Shoot
Tips for choosing locations, timing and creative approaches to photographing the Milky Way above the landscape for incredible nighttime photos.
Read More
Surf Photography: Catching The Wave
How to capture epic surf photography on land and in the water.
Read More
Depth Of Field In Macro Photography
In macro photography, depth of field is especially important to ensure the details of your subject are sharp. Use these 5 tips to get the best results.
The Art of Editing
Sometimes it's easy to pick the winners—they just jump out at you, like this image did when I first saw it on my screen. But usually editing is a more difficult task.
First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my post from last Friday. Your participation makes this blog more fun and interesting for everyone. You can also see more votes and comments on my personal blog.
Of the three dogwood images I posted, “C” was clearly the favorite. But there were some strong votes for A and B as well. Just another example of how subjective photography is!
It’s also an example of how difficult it can be to edit your work. When I ask students to bring a portfolio of ten images to a workshop, they often tell me how hard it was to narrow it down to such a small selection. Many have never had to do that before.
But editing—and I mean this in the traditional sense of selecting images, rather than processing or developing them—is one of the most important aspects of photography.
Did you ever suffer through a slide show of your friend’s vacation photos, featuring one boring image after another? The modern equivalent is looking at a Flickr stream where someone has posted every single photo from their latest trip, including ten slightly different compositions of each scene. If you want viewers to yawn and decide it’s a good time to check their email, then by all means, show everything. But if you want to grab people’s attention and keep it, you’ll have to edit.
And if you’re an aspiring pro, or just want to impress your friends with your photographic skill, remember that less is more. If people browse through your web site and see ten great photos mixed with ninety mediocre ones, they’ll think that you’re a mediocre photographer who got lucky ten times. But if you only showed the ten great ones, they’d think you’re the second coming of Ansel Adams.
If you need help with editing—and don’t we all?—Jim Goldstein interviewed Gary Crabbe about the subject, and I think there’s a lot of great information in this piece.
And here are some tips from my book, Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters:
I think that part about finding the right person, or people, to help edit your work is really important. My wife Claudia is a great editor, and I’m lucky to have her around (for many reasons, not just editing!). We don’t always agree about everything, but she has a great feeling for what people will like—a valuable asset for a professional photographer.
Of course not everyone is so lucky, and it can be hard to find the right person or people to give you objective feedback about your photographs. Camera clubs could be, and should be, a good forum for this, but all too often I hear that the judging is skewed by a too-strict adherence to certain rules of composition.
Flickr has been called “the world’s largest camera club,” with all the good and bad connotations that implies. Negative comments are seldom seen on Flickr or other photo-sharing sites, but if you have a large enough following on one of these sites you can judge how much an image “speaks” to people by how many comments it gets. But keep in mind that most of the viewers on these sites are other photographers, and photographers tend to like different images, for different reasons, than the population at large.
So this is an area where I think we can all help each other. Who do you turn to for objective feedback about your work? What kind of experiences have you had with camera clubs, or photo-sharing web sites? Please let us know by posting a comment!
—Michael Frye
Web Site Blog Workshops Newsletter Blog Subscription Twitter Facebook