The Online Photographer

Just wondering...do you have a portfolio? By that I mean some completely finished presentation that shows off your work, on some sort of portable media you can take with you or leave behind for review.

Time was, most photographers had a "book." In most cases it was an actual box or a large book with pages in it, and you'd have a representative sampling of your work in it, in print form. Sometimes, photographers would customize the book for specific clients, to more neatly dovetail with their needs. Artists often had solander cases with matted fine prints inside. And sometimes a pair of cotton gloves on top of the top print. Remember that?

I was just wondering if anyone does that any more—or does everyone point to a website? For that matter, do you have a website (we would have said web "page" in the '90s) any more?

What do you do when someone outside of your circle of good friends, someone from a more professional or business context, asks to see your work?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith: "Funny you ask. A few days ago a person running a horse training seminar asked if I was available since her regular photographer has another gig. I tried to point her to a page listing the various events I've done so she could see examples of my work, except her internet connection is crap. That's what I usually do when people ask. However, I do have several books of images, mostly for my personal use, not as a tool to find work. The easy problem is to get together. The much harder problem is for them to take the time to leaf through the book. Everybody is in such a rush these days."

Mike Ferron: "Viewing that photo makes me question my understanding of base reality."

Ken Bennet: "Portfolio: yes, but it's from circa 2010, the last time I thought I would need to look for a new job. I spent a long time making the prints and building the book. As it turned out, the portfolio was hugely useful in introducing my work to our new leadership where I worked (small university) and I ended up staying there. Looking at it now, it's still a pretty good summation of the kind of work I did. Website: yes, but now that I'm retired it's just personal work."

Joe Kashi: "Yes, I still use a metal portfolio case with exhibition-quality 18x24 prints. Prints are neither obsolete nor ephermeral, unlike viewing on a screen. Further, displaying actual prints is more conducive to serious discussion and tactile pleasure than an 8-bit sRGB image."

Nick: "For many of my peers, lets say currently 30–50 years old, we maintain an Instagram page as a de facto 'portfolio' of recent work. Anyone that isn't on IG seems suspicious as a potential hire, given that almost all commercial brands are also on IG and likely to hire people with a presence there. They expect IG-worthy content including BTS (behind the scenes) pictures and videos. Or as an amateur, almost all of the potential audience attention is also on IG. But people also see this as more of a loose portfolio, not formal. Many also maintain a personal webpage, and maybe create PDF example brochures of different types of content, e.g. a fashion brochure, a food brochure, etc., to send to enquirers. Or at least separate webpages for each type of work. Maybe even two sites, if one is for weddings, and one for commercial or art or food, etc. These are often sadly neglected and out of date though, as the recent work goes to IG by default."

Stan B.: "I have a website—as encouraged here several years ago. I have books or 'zines to display specific projects. Prints, beautiful as they are, are a luxury—just too dang expensive! Once when showing my physical 'book' (i.e., prints) back in the day (B&W images made at Mardi Gras). The editor glanced them over, called a few people in from adjoining offices and they all started to view them, point, laugh, recount long-ago jokes and anecdotes. An instant office party—to which I was excluded. Eventually, the banter ceased, the people exited. 'Sorry, there's really no interest in photos like these.' Right, rimshot...."

Josh Hawkins: "I have a website. Within that I have a few public-facing portfolios. It also has a link up top to my work image collection. That’s an ongoing collection of images that I add to on a regular basis. It makes those images available to my coworkers, and hopefully encourages them to bring me to photograph similar situations when they have them. It can serve as in-house advertising for me. It also makes it really easy to go through my best/favorite images, download them, and make a portfolio for a specific need. If I have a need for a portfolio I build one for only that use, and I keep it around 20 images. I hope that all makes some sense."

Kind of a whirlwind weekend! The first observation: whenever I do something other than work on TOP, it takes me away from...working on TOP. Over the years many people have suggested I do many other things, but the problem is, if I'm not working on the blog then the blog doesn't get done. And I need the blog to get done because that's the largest part of how I've made a living since 2009. (I've had to diversify a bit in recent years.)

The real estate photo job was veeeeery interesting. A friend who is getting into real estate sales, Michelle Kremmin, asked me to do the photos for her first "big" house, meaning a listing with a substantial asking price. It's the first photography job I've done since COVID (other than a few favors for friends), and also the first time I've ever done a listing photo assignment (I did a few shots for my own houses when I sold them). Here's the listing, but I'll suggest you look at the photos on your phone, as it appears they are optimized for that. They don't look great on my 27" computer. Probably my fault. I couldn't find image specs for the realtor Michelle works for, nor could I locate anyone who knew if they have any official image standards. Maybe such a thing doesn't exist, but it's obvious I gave them pictures that are too small. Live and learn.

To see the pictures better you can look at the set on SmugMug. Can you guess which ones were shot on the iPhone? Some are obvious. Maybe all. (Please tell me if that link works. It's supposed to show you a page with all the images already open, and it's supposed to ask you for a password if you try to download anything. If a few people could test that out for me I'd appreciate it. I'm new to SmugMug.)

I ended up delivering 38 pictures and charged $16 per prepared shot. No idea if that's cheap, expensive, or somewhere in the middle. I don't know anything about the market. I quoted Michelle $400 for 25 shots and then asked her permission to provide more. The only one she didn't use is the closeup of the three plants in the bay window. The pictures were all individually corrected but in some cases not quite to the point of being printable.  I just poked around the web for recommendations and ended up making the images 1200 pixels in the long dimension and sRGB. My friend and Corcoran School of Art '85 classmate Jay Townsend recommended SmugMug.

To answer the question of how my fealty to the truth would hold up, I did do a little Photoshopping, but mainly on things that could have been moved, such as a cord I forgot to hide, and things that are temporary and ephemeral anyway, like leaves. They're all pretty accurate and truthful pics of the real house.

As far as spaces are concerned, it's interesting. I've always been sensitive to the rendering of spaces, and I'm not in favor of making things look bigger by using wide-angle lenses. But on the other hand, people are getting accustomed to what we used to call "ultra-wide-angle" perspectives, because of the fact that many phones have very wide camera/lens modules. So my pictures kinda split the difference. They're a bit wider than I would have shot 10 or 20 years ago, but not so wide that they misrepresent the house (it's a big old house, with high ceilings and large rooms).

Main discovery: the job was a lot of work—five visits to the house including two to check the light and direction of the sun; three shoots, one main and two "cleanup"; a fair amount of driving; a fair amount of fretting and planning about weather; hours spent  in Adobe Camera Raw...

...But, I enjoyed it. If I didn't enjoy it, it would've been a pain. But I decided pretty early on that I was mainly having fun, and that made it easy to just go ahead and embrace the work.

It helps that houses have been a lifelong interest, although nothing I've ever really talked about. This interest has never had anything to do with my professional life; I just like houses is all. I love looking at floorplans, enjoy watching homebuilding videos (and used to enjoy several magazines about it, especially New Old House), and am always alert for interesting houses as I wander the little corner of the world I inhabit. I have a mental collection of houses around and about that I particularly like (for instance "The Handsomest House in Hall" at my Flickr page). Since the Internet came along, I also make a recreation of poking around on realty sites snooping into houses of all sorts. I'm interested in residential architecture but no other kind, particularly. I've read most of A Pattern Language.

Listing photos would be a nice way of getting to do interior photography without being a real interior photographer, seems to me. Architectural Digest quality interior photography is very fastidious, involved, equipment-heavy work. And anyway, does anyone buy it any more?

My old Fuji (a 2014 X-T1) was pressed into service, and I also did some of the shooting with the iPhone, which worked pretty well but which I won't do again. I did most of the shooting with a well-loved Fuji lens, the XF 14mm ƒ/2.8 R (21mm equivalent). I shot with lots of "air" (more in the shot than needed) so I could do geometrical corrections later. There are various tricks when shooting to make geometrical correction easier in post. My rule is that I try to do geometrical corrections when I can, but when I can't—in a tight powder room for instance—I make the converging or diverging verticals and horizontals strong and obvious. My other lenses are primes, and my thought is that I should consider a standard zoom for outdoor, details, and other supporting shots. Or maybe I just don't need it.

I'll probably ask my son if I can have the X-H1 back. If he wants to keep it, I might get an X-T50. It has the sensor and stabilization of the X-T5 at a slightly lower price.

Mostly, I'm hungry to research the whole shebang. I'd like to talk to realty companies, RE photographers, and agents, and learn more about standards and conventions in the field. How much do photographers charge? How many agents actually hire photographers? I also need to figure out if I actually want to do more of this work going into the future, and how exactly to position myself—for example, do people confine themselves to specific areas of the market? I've already considered charging more to photograph cheaper, worse-looking houses—I figure it's more work to make the houses look nicer, so you'd need to be paid more, right? Not less.

Is anyone out there a real-estate photographer? I'd love to hear from you.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bruce Katz: "Architectural Digest guy here ;-).

"I think you will find in short order that RE photography is not sustainable for the time and production values you have put into this project. To be competitive in this market, the entire shoot you did needs to be less than two hours in production time—including the post-production. You're competing with agents that shoot work themselves, or folks who offer photography, virtual walk-through videos, virtual staging and drone coverage for a few hundred dollars per project. Not a market that needs or can pay for creative work in any real fashion. If you want to try your hand at interior work, I would look toward the interior design / contractor / builder / architectural markets where the budgets are a little better and the production values are appreciated a little more.

"The upfront time necessary for success is considerable—marketing plans, portfolios, website, insurance requirements—it's a full time thing to make a go of it. Good luck!"

Mike replies: Thanks Bruce. Thankfully, though, I'm not trying to make a go of it...considering maybe one house per week during the temperate season as a weekend project. That might not work, I realize. Your insights are always valued however.

Christer Almqvist: "Three thing about the pictures: 1.) They were fit for purpose (old house). Subtle colours and not too dramatic light. 2.) A few ones could have profited from keystone correction, but there were other where converging lines were not disturbing. Not good was when verticals on one side of the picture were true verticals but the ones on the other side were not. Perhaps shooting from a bit lower than eye level would have been beneficial (garage picture). Converging lines in pictures of small spaces are OK. 3.) You charged much too little. (How much did you make per hour?)"

Mike replies: Interesting question. Wish I had kept track of hours.

Frank Linden: "I knew a guy who was doing this professionally in Sydney years ago and went to observe him at work one morning where he got through two residences. He was using a crop-sensor Canon with the 10–18mm zoom that was gaffer-taped to always be at the widest angle. He shot everything around ƒ/8 or ƒ/11 and for interiors he would do three exposures, one base exposure, one with flash bounced off the ceiling for fill, and one for the outside light. The camera was always on a tripod. All post production was done offshore, Philippines I think, where they would do all the exposure blending, verticals corrections etc. He was an employee of a company that did real estate photography so they had the whole system set up. They were not doing high-end places, more mid- to lower-end.

"The main thing I learned is that this is mostly photography as a commodity, knowing what the market wants and providing it. When I left him that day he was having a late lunch then off to shoot his third and final house of the day."

Mike replies: When I wanted to start a portrait business years ago, Carl encouraged me to cost everything out precisely and then figure out exactly how many shoots I would need to do per day to make a living. Then he told me to simply ask myself if I wanted to do that many portraits every day, week-in, week-out. Well, I carried out his suggestion seriously. And it was SCARY. I would have had to do something like two portraits a day three days a week and three portraits a day the other three days, with one day off. Not even counting the work involved in attracting and booking the commissions in the first place.

At the time, if I did one portrait in a day, it would take three and a half hours all counted, and pretty much wreck me for the rest of that day, and then I'd need to spend the next day doing something else to recover.

Richard G: "Here’s a link to Jamie who supervises a troupe of realty photographers. It’s hilarious."

Joel F Bartlett: "Having shot interiors and exteriors after remodels for a local design-build company for well over a decade, I’ll risk offering a a few observations.

"I shoot with designers looking over my shoulder and as a result, I know what they want to feature in the photos. You’ll need to chat with the listing agent to understand what they see as important things to emphasize for the listing. Shoot some other things too as they may be handy. Your job is to make the viewer imagine what it would be like for them and their possessions to live in that house.

"Shoot wide, you/they can always crop.

"How big an image? As big as you’ve got. I shoot with an APS-C camera, a Leica CL, and deliver a full size image after any agreed upon cropping. They can always make it smaller.

"SmugMug is my friend. I’ve used it for almost as long as it has existed. That’s how I deliver my images and show my own work.

"Dressing the set. Hopefully the agent helps here. The worst possible experience you can have is to be dropped into a house by yourself with the current family, pets, and clutter and you’re expected to make it look like Architectural Digest. They’re not paying you anywhere near enough to put up with that.

"Getting color 'right.' If the room was recently painted, the agent might hand you three Pantone samples and ask you to make the colors right. You’ll have to repeatedly explain how the color of the light in the room varies as there are multiple sources. I have repeatedly had this discussion with designers as I shoot kitchens with two different color LED lights, a weird fluorescent, and both direct and indirect sunlight (reflected off some odd colored wall). I will often shoot additional shots with a white color target to help deliver something like what the client wants.

"If the client wants both interior and exterior (through windows) color 'correct,' change extra as you’ll be spending some time in Photoshop.

"Lights? When I started doing this, I used studio strobes to attempt to get uniform lighting. At this point, most remodels are overlit so I don’t have to bring additional light. I use available interior and exterior light and do some post-processing as required. Lightroom’s graduated filters are your friend. Or, if you ever have to shoot a very dark bathroom, votive candles are your friend too.

"Rights? The agent will want to freely use your photos in any possible way for perpetuity. Price accordingly.

"Pay? It ain’t what it once was.

"In spite of this, I’ve enjoyed working with my clients."

Mike replies: Thanks Joel. Re "getting color right," you'll like this—Phil Davis, Professor Emeritus of Photography at the University of Michigan, author of Beyond the Zone System, and my de facto technical editor at Darkroom Techniques magazine, and a top car photographer in Detroit in the 1950s, had a dining room in the house he built at Whitmore Lake that had a George Nakashima table and a large plate-glass north-facing window. He understood color theory very well, so he painted all the walls of the room slightly different colors to enhance the effect of the light that was naturally reflected on each wall. You sensed the effect immediately upon entering the room but it was difficult to put your finger on exactly why it looked like that. Really quite stunning, and something I had never seen before and haven't seen since.

Picture from the Cruise Day show in town this weekend

I like exercises. I used to teach, and I liked devising exercises that might stand a chance of shaking my students out of their "usual tricks" as my own teacher Frank DiPerna used to say, and help them to see and organize pictures in different ways.

I have a sort of faith about this. It goes like this: I believe that the mind does a lot of our work for us, behind the scenes—or behind the senses, so to speak—and if you present the mind with a problem, then just butting up against those problems will cause new and different things to happen in your regular everyday work. And it doesn't really matter if you "succeed" at the exercise—even if you just struggle with it for a while, it can still have a good effect. The idea is that the mind will solve the problem for you; all you have to do is present the problem to your mind. It will do its work independently. In fact, it might even be better if you're not facile enough to succeed at solving the problem right away. A recalcitrant problem presents the mind more clearly with a challenge.

I'm not sure I'm right about this, by the way. It's just what I believe.

Anyway, think about cropping. It used to be that cropping entailed a fair amount of work. You might draw lines with a grease pencil on tiny little 35mm contact proofs, then try to duplicate that composition with the projected negative image on the easel; or maybe you started with a print and drew on that. Anyone remember those manual cropping angles that consisted of two "squares" (I mean like a carpenter's square) connected by a metal rod? The only one I could find is this discontinued "Scaleograph" at B&H, which at least lets you see what it looks like. I used to take bond paper and just move the sheets around to show different areas of a workprint.

Actual cropping is much easier now—first we got zoom lenses, then image editing programs, and now we can do it with quick and simple pinching and spreading commands on our phones or tablets using our fingers. Whee. It's nice. But the problem of learning to see crops, also called details, remains. You look at a scene, and there are thousands of compositions possible from just one standpoint, and billions of potential compositions if you're willing to move around. How do you process that into a successful picture? ...In the time you've got available?

(I gotta watch it that I don't amplify this topic outward and start talking about composing in general....)

Anyway, here's one exercise that I do a fair amount. I do it just for fun, not for results—not to make finished work. Take an expansive picture of an overall scene. Then play a little game of "find a picture" inside the frame. You can do it right on the back of a phone or tablet, or you can do it back at your computer. I almost always do it on my phone (I don't do it with real cameras for some reason).

So here's the whole frame that the composition above comes from:

I've written about this before, certainly.

But it crops up again and again. The way I generally shoot is to find something and then work it—walking around, trying different compositions, waiting for elements to change or for something to happen. I'm just looking for the one good shot. I don't care about all the rest; they're just process. When I ingest to the computer I'll have anywhere from three to 40 exposures of each "motif," all basically in search of that one good shot. Most of the time—not all of the time—the last shot, or one near the end, will be the best one. That's because as I shoot I understand the picture better. A lot of my near misses make me think to myself, "should have worked that one harder."

I think it's very lazy when people show multiple tries at one photograph. It's the photographer's duty to pick one. It's your picture; you decide which exposure is best. Don't expect the viewer to do it.

But that doesn't mean it's always easy. I occasionally have two pictures that work for me and have trouble deciding between them. Take this for example:

Version 1

Version 2

Version 1 was one of the first ones I shot at that spot. It's handsome, but it's also old-fashioned; it could be a Farm Security Administration photograph. The second one is a little quirkier, more off-balance, which I like. Then again, I have a tendency to resist my classicist impulses, which I believe are too strong. So I go back and forth. I don't really know which one is better.

Sometimes, of course, not being able to decide means that both of them aren't quite keepers. It's very tempting to think you got something just because you got it. You have to be awake to the fact that sometimes you just didn't bag the game.

The solution
The solution for me is usually time. If I continue looking at variants of a picture for a few days, what usually happens is that my mind sorts it out. I'll start liking one better and the other one less.

It hasn't happened yet with these two. I hope it will. I'm not putting both of them on Flickr; it's my responsibility to decide.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Rod S.: "My choice is clear; it's number one. It's the stronger photograph, by far. It accentuates the power pole and makes me look up at the top of the frame, thereby strengthening the sense of tallness that, surely, was at least a large part of the visual pull for the photograph. The second shot just doesn't do any of that. It isn't strong enough to be interesting. Shooting 4x5, I had to learn to do that process you describe 'by eye' before making an exposure."

Ben: "I like #2 better. My feeling is that #1 is about the telephone pole, while #2 is a balance between road and sky. For me the pole in #1 interrupts the dynamism of the clouds. Plus the shadow of the pole in #2 is very nice."

robert e: "I see your dilemma. In an abstract sense, version 1 is the better composition, but it doesn't really say anything. The second version, on the other hand, tells a story—of wilderness (the tree and sky), settlement (the house), cultivation (the crops) and development (the road), and it's an ongoing story relevant to the setting. The composition may be unorthodox—and less strong per se—but it serves the narrative, making it the stronger picture overall. Normally, I'm biased toward formalism and aesthetics, but in this case it seems I prefer the storytelling.

"I think that's the biggest challenge in photography—whatever our intention, every photo has both form and content, and their interaction (or lack thereof) can make or break the picture."

Trygve Strömberg: "I prefer the first one. It is tranquil and relaxing. Just sit down, chew on a straw and watch the clouds sail by. The second one is more dynamic and restless, the leading lines forcing me forward to the house in the distance."

xf mj: "Your two frames here remind me of several side-of-road moments, where the light is amazing, but I can’t quite access the scene to get The One. I might really want a ladder and am feeling a real urge to tresspass, and so I just snap a few, shrug, and drive on. I’m also very much reminded of once wearing a cast and having a strong itch under it that I couldn’t quite scratch. Thanks, Mike!"

I have houseguests today, my second cousin Elizabeth Rose and her husband Eric Devine. Elizabeth Rose was also the name of the previous head of Clan Rose in the Scottish Highlands; my cousin also has a lot of Slavic heritage from her mother's side. She's an accomplished artist, a printmaker, who was recently away for a year in Poland on a Fulbright Fellowship. Eric used to be a wildlands firefighter, the guys who battle the huge forest fires in the American West. Now, after a sojourn in nursing school, he is a traveling R.N. who works in neurology. He's under contract in St. Louis, where they have to live in temporary arrangements. They sometimes stop and see me on their trips between St. L. and the huge wilderness areas of New York State where they like to hike and camp. This trip it was the Catskills. (Here's a map showing the Adirondacks [upper] and Catskills Parks in green.)

So I will make today's post short. -Ish.

Andreas wrote, yesterday: "Maybe, if you could tell us about things right out of your head it would be easier.  :-)  E.g., tell me how to sort through say 500–1,000 shots from a holiday and find the very few to keep."

Mike replies: Okay, that's pretty straightforward.

Start by defining a preliminary number goal. 1–6 for a memento, 15–20 for a set, 20–30 for a show, 60–80 for a book—but remain flexible, because the work itself will help set the number the edited set "wants" to be.

From there, here are two ways to go:

The Culling Method
Start with a rough edit meant to get rid of the chaff and filler. Obvious mistakes; anonymous postcard attempts; the useless detail shots that everybody thinks are artistic but that say absolutely nothing; near misses for which you had hopes when you were behind the camera but that really didn't quite work. Don't bother being heartless at first—anything that pulls on your affections, it's okay to keep for now. Get rid of what you can.

Wait a few days. Physically separate the pictures, or separate them virtually into different folders or whatever.

Take a second pass. First, look through the rejects and see if anything precious needs "saving." Then discard or set aside the rejects and don't look at them again. Then return to the remaining pictures and make another culling pass, getting rid of what you can.

Once you're down to 50–150, depending on your final goal, sequence them. This can be imperfect, but think of the flow, of variety from one to the next, of peaks and valleys—a simple sequencing strategy is to open with several strong pictures, end with several strong pictures, and have a strong handful in the middle, then build the connections of quieter or weaker shots in between. If the shooting is from a trip, then chronological sequencing might make sense, but don't be rigid—clusters of pictures from the same location but out of order, or something else, might work better. Remember that in sequencing, visual flow is just as good a principle as intellectual flow. Make sure the pictures look good next to their neighbors.

Then look at the story you're telling. Are there repetitions? Maybe you got six nice shots of a group of local kids, but you only need one. Make choices there; keep one but get rid of redundant shots. Are there imbalances? Too many shots of the beach you liked but not enough of the mountain hike? Or whatever? Get the different motifs into balance a bit. Experiment with taking certain shots out—is there loss, or does the omission not matter? Eliminate distractions from the overall theme. Does a picture that you like for an unrelated reason really contribute to the overall presentation? Get rid of what you can. Don't forget that there will be a lot of good (i.e., sharp, well-exposed, well-composed) shots that you just don't need.

Gradually, working in stages, allowing pauses for contemplation and for your choices to "soak in," successive rounds of culling will get you down to your number.

The Big Hits Method
This basically comes from the other direction. Look through all your pictures and note the few that you think are the very absolute best—the ones that hit on all cylinders for you, the ones you're completely proud of, the ones that are unambiguous "yesses" with no reservations. Make a couple of passes through the work noting those pictures in your mind. After doing this two or three times over at least a couple of hours and maybe a day or two, set those pictures apart. Don't worry about how many there are.

Then the trick is to just keep adding more pictures that you think support your hits as best as possible. Again, sequencing helps. Which of the hits need to be near each other and which further apart? Which need some quieter, more ordinary shots surrounding them to highlight their qualities? Experiment with finding other pictures that improve the flow from one of you hits to another.

Bonus
Obviously there are a lot of variations in these strategies, based on your goals, the nature of the project, the end use and the audience you envision, and how strict you feel like being with yourself. But a big bonus of doing this, one that is not to be undervalued, is that the process you go through in editing will start to help you when you shoot. You'll become more conscious of the kinds of shots you're going to need when you get to the editing stage. You'll find yourself looking at a detail shot and what will come to mind is the fact that you never need shots like that when you edit; so you just won't take that shot. The feedback loop continually improves your understanding of your shooting.

It's better to demonstrate this than just to talk about it, and there are a great many ways to edit, but this gives you a couple of basic tried-and-true strategies.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

A. D. Coleman uses two particular words with respect to photography that I think are illuminating. They're both scholarly-sounding words, and I think Allen uses them in ways that he has refined somewhat beyond their dictionary definitions. The words are "reify" and "redact."

"Reify" means to make real. This is of course an important word for artists, since artists are all the time getting ideas. An artistic project can actually have a rich life and and an elaborate structure in your head without being anything more than a notion; but until you "make it real," it's unlikely that anyone else is going to be able to get much out of it. Also, of course, the process of reifying any idea usually changes the idea, which is the fodder for so much of what goes on in art schools, not to mention what happens when you go out with a camera.

You might have the idea that you want to photograph the logging industry, or make a series of pictures that are all blue, or whatever else you might think of, but to be art the idea has to be made real by being put into some transmittable form.

"Redact" is a word the meaning of which, unless I misread him, Allen has extended somewhat. Strictly, it means to edit a text for publication. More generally, it can be thought of as putting any kind of creative project into final form.

Redaction is the reason why so many successful artists prefer to work toward some sort of culmination with any given body of work. For some it's to publish the work as a book, for others it's to have a show. There's no standard form for fully redacted work, of course; the concept simply implies that the work is wholly and completely reified to the limits of the artist's intentions, abilities, or resources.

Redaction, I think, is what really "separates the men from the boys," if the women reading this will forgive the expression. Most of us don't even edit our work, much less redact it into some coherent final form. Redaction, as those of you who have done it even once will be well aware, is very hard work. It requires that edits be hard, sequences be set in stone, final prints be made and matted, and the work be submitted to judgment with no excuses. For some it's even threatening work, requiring a certain kind of courage, since to finish something is to close it off to future improvements either actual or imagined.

The redaction project that is most common among photographers is the portfolio. (As you read this, ask yourself: do you have a portfolio that you could present without a single excuse or elaboration as being representative of what you've done as a photographer?) A custom book is also a great project, or even the humble "photo album." A fine print framed and hung can reify and redact a single picture.

Redaction is anyone's best shot at a legacy of any sort—whether it's to be worldwide fame in times to come or a considerate heirloom for the great-grandkids. The better the print, the less likely someone will be to throw it away. The more complete and finished the project, the easier other people find it to understand and appreciate, and the more likely they are to value and preserve it. It can be anything; but whatever it is, finish it. It will help it to endure.

Whatever form it takes, redaction is really the key to accomplishment, as well as to a "legacy."

Mike

[TOP is on hiatus this week. This was
originally published in 2007.]

This post relates to the next one pretty well. (Coming up.)

In a recent email, our friend the book author John Camp wrote:

"A couple of weeks ago you had a guy who wrote that if a street photo isn’t something a friend would tap you on the shoulder about—'Hey, look at that'—then it probably wasn’t a worthwhile street photo. I thought about that for a few minutes, and decided that the shoulder-tap was a great criterion for a street photo.

"Then I went and ordered that Bystander street photography book (from your site; I’ll thank myself on your behalf), and it really is a refutation of the should-tap idea. A very large proportion of the street photos I liked best were not shoulder-tap photos—they were photos of something a skilled photographer saw and snapped in an instant. For example, the very first photo in the book is the famous Cartier-Bresson shot of a man jumping across a puddle. If you tapped somebody on the shoulder and he turned to look, all he would see would be a man in a dark suit walking along. The moment would be gone. There are all kinds of shots that were made because of transitory facial expressions or split-second shots of kids acting out and in several cases, or because of shadows and contrasts that you walk through all the time…and they’re really good. So I’m somewhat down off the shoulder-tap idea, although it may still may have relevance for a certain kind of shooter."

It's a fair point, and broadly I agree. But to me, Kenneth Wajda's "shoulder tap" idea (here's the original article again) isn't exactly that you should be able to tap a friend on the shoulder and say "look at that" before making an exposure; it's that what you photograph ought to be something that someone else might agree is worth a second look.

There's at least one complication: we all differ over what's worth looking at. As an example of that, a reader sent me a link to a camera review recently. I thought the illustration pictures were particularly dreadful, and I said so. He wrote back and said he'd had the opposite reaction, that "they seemed of much better quality than the usual rote images." Another friend sent a group email with a link to some photos he liked, and one of the recipients thought the color was out of whack "in a way that makes the pictures really unpleasant to look at." Clearly, one person's trash is another's treasure, and vice-versa.

So then where's the useful nexus of this idea?

For me it's that we need to be sufficiently demanding of ourselves, our subjects, and our photographs.

I got this idea from photographer and artist Shirley True many years ago. She taught at the Corcoran, where I studied photography, but I wasn't in any of her classes. We were working in the school group darkroom once, and I asked her opinion of the picture I was printing.

Well, she didn't like it. She thought it was too flat, for one thing (she was probably right; I was really into low contrast for quite a while). That was the response everyone expected while printing—amounting to, how's my judgement here? Have I got the exposure and contrast right? But she went further—she said she didn't think much of the picture, either. She thought it was missing something, that it looked more like a reject than a select, you might say. Almost offhand, she made a curious comment—she said I wasn't "demanding enough" of my subject.

I chewed on that for a while afterwards. At a gallery show opening a few weeks later I asked her what she had meant by her comment. It's difficult here to put Shirley's own words back into her mouth when I've long since forgotten what the original picture was—and because thirty-odd years have passed!—but the meaning I took from it was that we have to have the courage and perseverance to get the best out of what we're photographing or we haven't really done our subject justice. She'd probably intuited that I'd been too shy to really confront the woman in my photograph, because I'd been afraid of the reaction I might get if I more aggressively went after the picture I really wanted. 

She was doubtless right on. I was just too egotistic at the time to agree.

I've had that thought many times over the years since—I'll look at a portfolio or set of pictures and it's just clear that the photographer isn't demanding enough of his or her subject. They haven't made enough exposures to get the shot they were after, they didn't want to follow the subject or get into their space, they photographed them surreptitiously in some way—from the back, say, or when they weren't looking—or the camera was just too far away from the subject, the photographer not close enough. The result is not entirely a "no," but not completely a "yes" either.

Snapcrap
I think the same concept applies to pictures themselves. We're living in an era of anti-editing—anyone can post their own pictures anywhere. On the one hand, we congratulate ourselves on the freedom this allows, and decry the former world in which self-appointed gatekeepers kept our pictures from being seen. It's a fair point, but the opposite hasn't proved to be much better—now we live under a virtual Niagara of pointless snapcrap because many people don't even try to edit the good shot from all the ones they took around it. They just chuck everything up on the Web, presumably to let the hypothetical viewers sort it out themselves.

I think you could also call this "being demanding," but of our pictures. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard to just show the good ones; but of course it is. In an era of freedom and self-direction, more discipline and more principle and more restraint are needed, not less.

I get the feeling I've done a poor job of explaining my ideas here. This should probably be a five-day essay, not a one-day one. I hope you're able to fish from this gob of words the ones that got to the point. As a summary:

• Photographers should be demanding enough of their subjects, applying enough of whatever is needed—courage, boldness, energy, persistence, or whatever it is—to get the shot they really want. To go to whatever lengths necessary.

• As self-editors photographers should be demanding of their own work, recognizing the real successes and having the self-discipline to realize when they almost succeeded but didn't quite, or when a decent shot was just part of the process of getting a better one.

Anyway, that's the context in which I think the "tap on the shoulder" idea is useful. I can easily see that if Cartier-Bresson showed his puddle-jumper picture to ten friends, probably at least nine of the ten would understand why he thought it was a picture worth looking at. He has in effect tapped them on the shoulder and said "look at this"—and they knew why. Whereas with a great mass of the effluvium on the Internet these days, I can all too easily imagine showing a print to a friend or a passer-by only to elicit a response of, why are you showing me this? Why should I look at this?

I think that's the essence of the tap on the shoulder idea. It's a sort of minimum indicator of whether a photo works or is simply self-indulgent. Although, as I say, tastes vary, and sometimes a photographer does take pictures other people don't get.

I'll try to get the next post done today, since I think it at least partly relates to this one. [UPDATE: To be posted Saturday.]

Mike

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The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "Someone once asked me for my opinion on their work, which took the form of a Flickr site. There was a huge mass of images. Some of this and some of that. A sea of pictures. I think she uploaded her camera card each time it filled, with no curation at all. Definitely not demanding.... So I asked her to choose five pictures I could look at. Apparently that was an impossible request because no pictures were forthcoming."

Wiley Bogren: "I very much appreciated both the topic and the thoughts and experiences that went into it. Thought you did a perfect job (for me at least) conveying the intended gist, without extra vapor or grist. Well written on a great topic. Thank you!"

Mike replies: Thank you. I should really take more time.

Q: "At the risk of sounding persnickety, may I suggest a slight change in wording?

"I'd like to suggest that we should be demanding of ourselves or our processes, as you originally suggested, rather than of our subjects. In your summary, you do say this yourself: 'Photographers should... [apply] enough of whatever is needed—courage, boldness, energy, persistence, or whatever it is—to get the shot they really want.'

"As someone who's terrified of walking up to a person on the street and saying, 'Excuse me, may I take your picture?', my initial reaction was to think, 'I'm already asking them to do something for me; now I need to demand that they hang around until I'm satisfied that I've accomplished my goal?' Also, as primarily a landscape photographer, I can't exactly say to a wave, 'I love that curl—hold it right there!' or to the fast-setting sun, 'Wait—keep the light on the tops of those trees for just a few more minutes while I try different angles!'

"The salient difference, to me at least, is who's doing the work. Saying that we need to be demanding of our subjects suggests that it's the subjects that need to do the work; what your article says (I think) is that we as photographers need to do the work: anticipation and timing, perspective, framing, and so on. And I agree completely with that.

"I also agree that we need to be rigorous in editing. Here you've been very helpful, to me anyway: I've (more or less) adopted your process of selecting a few pictures from each outing and sitting with them for a few days to see which ones have staying power. Thank you for that."

This morning I am hard at work closing browser windows. I have so many windows and tabs open—there must be more than five hundred—that it's slowing down my browser and/or my computer, and making it difficult to find things. I have more than 5,000 bookmarks already and no time to sort them all and jettison the ones I no longer need or that no longer work, but I'm adding the URLs I need to keep to two new categories of bookmark. The impetus this morning: I started a new post on a browser page and can no longer find it. It's lost. I don't think it's gone; I just don't know what window it's in or where the tab is.

It's hell being disorganized. Despite sporadic attempts at bringing things under control, I'm naturally not very well organized. It's a mental aptitude and I don't have it. My best defense has always been to limit complexity, and limit the number of possessions I have to keep track of. I haven't done very well with that.

This is dated now, because it concerns film negatives and proof sheets, but here's my longtime pet theory on "photo asset management": At first, we don't have much work. We've only shot a few dozen or a hundred or three hundred rolls of film, and it's reasonably easy to find things simply by looking for them. This stack? That box? Ah, here they are. No prob.

That's the attitude we start out with. A comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system? Why? What's the need? Seems like overkill.

...Until it doesn't. One day follows the next, one month the next, the year ends and a new one starts; the years go by. We keep taking pictures. Negatives or slides pile up; we think, hmm, I should organize that lot soon. But there's more immediate work insisting on being done, and the organization tasks keep getting shoved to the back burner. 

I did attempt to catch up once...in 1987. I took the whole Winter and organized all my rolls of negatives into PrintFile folders and made fiber-base (the term of art was not "fiber-based" but "fiber base") contact sheets, and put them in sequence in archival binders with slipcases (some of you remember Light Impressions). It was an enormous amount of labor. And it was expensive. I never did it again.

Sooner or later, it's too late. We've gotten into sloppy habits, we have piles of prints and negatives and contacts of all manner of description in every stage of completion and it's all over everywhere and it's overwhelming. It's now too late to start that comprehensive, thoroughgoing, sensible, rigorous organization system we were certain at first we didn't need.

And everybody's like that. Two stories: in the early '90s I was waiting to talk to a photo gallerist at the AIPAD Show in New York City. She was on the phone; clearly some kind of crisis. She kept giving me signals that said she knew I was waiting for her and implied that she would try to get to me. At a pause in the conversation, she covered the mouthpiece of the landline phone and explained: the Angels are missing!

She was on the phone with Salgado in Brazil. She had orders for the Angel picture—real title, "Primeira comunhão em Juazeiro do Norte, Brasil, 1981" (First Communion in Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil, 1981)—that had been on the cover of the then-recent bestselling photobook An Uncertain Grace...and Sebastião couldn't find the negative.

As far as my digital asset management is concerned, you really don't want to know. As an indicator, I'll just mention that my first three years of digital shooting—2003–2006, with an Olympus C3040z—is no longer extant. I lost it all somehow, between now and then, in some data transfer or another or on one failed hard drive or another. No idea, really. I do remember some of the pictures. My son's first day of second grade; good times with my friends at Spring Lake. But it's all gone.

Second story: Arnold Crane was visiting Walker Evans in Connecticut to photograph him. Evans, always a natty dresser even in his youth when he was poor as the proverbial church mouse, was very neatly turned out, according to Arnold, and his entire house was clean as a whistle and neat as a pin—the objects on tables were as arranged, Arnold said, as exquisitely and artfully as a Japanese rock garden. But then Walker took Arnold to see his archives, and led him to an office room that was considerably messier. There, filling the far corner of the room, were the archives of the great Walker Evans—in heaps and jumbles of prints and negative sleeves and papers and boxes! Not even the habitually fastidious Walker Evans kept his prints and negs in order. Arnold showed me the photo of it. Made me laugh.

And so it goes. Evans died in 1975, and the Walker Evans archive is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where presumably it is organized in a suitably orderly fashion. And now I'll get back to work attempting to close my open tabs and browser windows, and finish my tea.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Holmes: "I haven't dug through my negatives for quite a long time now, but I do try to maintain good organization habits with my digital images. I firmly believe that if you don't keyword an image as soon as you import it, you might as well throw it away. Immediately after importing a day's images into Capture One, I add keywords to every single image. If there's an image I don't feel like keywording, I move it to the trash. And I try to add every conceivable keyword I can think of. I might keyword an image 'ford mustang' but that won't help if someday I search for '1968' 'green' and 'car.' (And 'steve mcqueen.') (I also have a personal rule to keyword everything in lower case. Otherwise I end up having to search for both 'Mustang' and 'mustang.')

"And that leads to my highly recommended method for organizing images: create Smart Folders, or Smart Collections, or Smart Albums or whatever your asset manager calls them for every possible project or theme. Smart collections are wonderful because they allow you to organize a single image into multiple collections. You can view a smart collection through any additional filter, and if you ever need to move your image library to a new asset managing applications, all you need to do is create the same smart collections, because every asset manager transfers keywords. And all the asset managers I'm familiar with allow you to put smart collections into folders, for even more organization.

"That's it. Good keywords will allow you to find any image you ever took. And smart albums let you organize groups of images by project, person name, country, vacation, whatever."

Keith B.: "That is why I tell people that I used iPhoto and now Photos. The automatic organization tools are good enough for me, so that it fits my lazy workflow, just throw them in and be done with it. I have started to add some keywords and places, but just enough to help other people find things."

John Camp: "It is apparently widely agreed that messy desks—what you essentially have—is a sign of genius. I suspect you knew that, but were too modest to mention it. Some time back in the 'aughts, I went to Iraq and flew with an air assault battalion. The images, from a Nikon D3, are carefully filed in a stand-alone Lightroom program. I can't find the computer."

Mike replies: Genius, no, but creative...I do think of ideas all the time. It's exhausting. I wish I could give it a rest, and concentrate calmly on one or two things and let everything else go.

BTW, you loaned me that D3 and its amazing but huge zoom for a post, do you remember? Thanks again for that.

Peter Wright (partial comment): "Your story about losing your new post in your browser fairly boggled my mind! That would seem to bring disorganization to new heights (or new depths). And I thought I was bad!"

Martin D: "Every missing file, every mislaid print: from now on I will think of Walker Evans, and in my grief for the missing picture, I will smile."

Mim: "This is very familiar. I've never been naturally organised—I lived in what looked like chaos, more or less kept up with things that people demanded of me (or that I promised them) and had a kind of mental map of where stuff was—a bit like your early 'photo asset management' except it covered my whole life. I could usually put my hand on something I needed reasonably quickly but did spend an hour (or two or three) per week digging for stuff.

"...Until I got a chronic illness. For two years I barely got out of bed and now I have about three or four useful hours per day with my mental energy taking just as hard a hit as my physical energy. Suddenly I couldn't track my whole life in my head anymore, and I couldn't spend an hour searching for something because that was a quarter of my day gone. For a while I worried that I was forever going to live in chaos and never find anything ever again. Then I (slowly) got neater. More organised. I'm still not great but most things have a place and most are actually in their place most of the time. My photos are on my computer neatly sorted by year and even backed up on my NAS and it's rare that I can't find the one I want in quick order.

"So it is possible to improve—but I doubt I ever would have done it if I hadn't been forced into it; it certainly doesn't come naturally."

Tom: "When I worked on a newspaper in the film era there was film everywhere. We printed from the whole 36-exposure length and afterwards it was loosely coiled and left on shelves and tables. We never got on top of filing unless it was a neg we wanted for our portfolios in which case we quietly, individually stored them properly. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what became of the tens of thousands of black-and-white prints we produced either. They simply seemed to disappear after their trip to the process camera and we never gave them a second thought. Such was the pace on a newspaper."

Rand Scott Adams: "Dang...I hate being the voice of reason. I used to have your disease. But it isn’t a mental aptitude. It’s pure discipline. For me, the pain of the consequences finally outweighed the pleasure of sloth. I once took a seminar on 'office efficiency' wherein the instructor recommended OHIO. 'Only Handle It Once.' You pick something up, you 'deal with it' before you put it down. Changed my life. Applies equally to literal and virtual 'things.'"

Which is better:

or

?

I learned a lesson long ago. I was on the Mall in D.C. for one of the regular "festival"-type gatherings of the throngs—I forget what it was, maybe the Fourth of July—it was hot—and I came across an open hydrant which had created a sea of mud in front of it. In the sea of mud, a large, muscular black guy was taking on all comers in mud-wrestling contests. He won a number of challenges, until a shorter, dumpy-looking white kid with a strangely confident smile stepped up. The white kid beat the big black guy. It quickly became obvious to me why: the big guy was not a trained wrestler, and the shorter guy was; I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the white kid had been on a college wrestling team and had put in thousands of hours of focused practice. But the bigger guy, without animosity, seemed genuinely curious as to why he was getting beaten. So each time he lost, he insisted on another contest—and he would lose again. There was no hostility in it. There was quite a large crowd watching, the whole time. After about four goes, the new champion begged off, washed all the mud off himself in the spray from the hydrant, and wandered away in the company of his girlfriend, and the black guy asked for new challengers. The crowd began to disperse.

As I watched all this, I took a roll and a half of pictures—maybe 50 frames or so. That was a lot, at that time. I probably took those 50 frames over 15 or 20 minutes. I didn't photograph quickly—I was taking care, picking my spots, doing the best I could. I figured I had it covered.

But when I got to the darkroom—what a headache! I made at least 15 workprints (my method at that time was to make quick 8x10 workprints on RC paper to edit from—my rule was that I had to make at least one workprint from every roll of film—that was to overcome laziness—and I couldn't make any more than six—that was to enforce selectivity at the stage of viewing the contacts with the illuminated loupe, which was the first pass in the editing process.

But rules are made to be broken, and I wasn't sold on any of the first six workprints I made of the wrestlers, so I made more. There just wasn't one standout shot that rose head and shoulders above all the others; a number of them were competent.

Now, I suspect that the best way to tell the story might have been to pick three or four that worked synergistically and mat them together, in a row. I didn't consider that at the time. (I'd been trained to be an exhibiting art photographer, but I wasn't one. I never did become one—the difference is that, then, I thought I would someday.)

I finally did manage to choose one, and I made a fine (i.e., final) print of the selection. (On Ilford Galerie, if any of you remember that!)

The lesson I took from the experience was maybe a little contrary: I decided I shouldn't shoot so much. I loved it when Jane Bown, the great English portraitist (I think she actually is English—born in Herefordshire and brought up in Dorset?), said that she noticed the first few and last few pictures she took during a sitting were the best, so she stopped taking all the ones in the middle! Heh. I'm always trying to take fewer shots, because the fewer shots I take, the more I try to get it right before I push the shutter button.

And the easier the editing is.

There are always editing headaches, though. Especially with landscapes—for me, landscapes are particularly difficult to edit. The differences are subtle and the effects you think you notice aren't always perceptible to others.

In this case, I think the second picture is stronger. It puts the main subject—the still surface of the pond reflecting the sky—a little more centrally, it prevents the black clump of trees in the upper left from drawing too much attention from the eye while still letting it balance the bit of fence at the opposite corner. And it shows more of the fence.

Took me a while to get there, though. They're so close to the same. Should have only taken one!

I should really go see if I can find that old shot of the wrestlers to show you. Surely it's around here someplace....

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bandbox: "Re 'Should have only taken one!' Usually true, and the thing about digital is that you can shoot all around your subject and take as many as you want. I do it all the time with landscapes and interiors, and it's made me careless and less decisive because it allows me to put off the decision until I view all the images on a computer screen. The good shooting habits and visualization acquired over fifty plus years of using film have flown out the window."

Peggy C.: "When I first saw the images, I preferred the first one. I found my eyes being drawn to the sunlight on the field. However, once I started to compare them by bouncing back and forth between them, I found myself being drawn very strongly to the second image. I like the effect of the dark shore line, blue lake and the dark grasses and fence. If it were me, I’d even go so far as to crop out the field just where it meets the shadow of the shore.

"Drives one of my sisters-in-law crazy (for various reasons I truly enjoy, shhh) because she loves trees. And I mean, really loves trees...to the point that she believes it should be a jail-able offense to ever cut them down. Even if they are on another person’s property! However, my favorite time of year to photograph trees is after they’ve lost all their leaves. I am more strongly drawn to the pattern of bare branches than at any other time of year. Even in my astrophotography I am more likely to show the stars through bare branches. Probably why I am drawn to the pattern of the fence and grasses in your second photo. For me, the pattern is in the grasses."

Steve Jacob: "I used to take lots of shots of things that looked interesting, but didn't make interesting images. No amount of tinkering would change that. If I couldn't pick one it was often because none of them really grabbed me. When a series of images all have potential, it's usually obvious which one hit's the mark. If you have to analyse, if you have to look too hard, the chances are that none of them work. I learned to know what would possibly make a good picture, and what wouldn't. If I am not sure, I check in the VF, but I'm usually right the first time.

"I take far fewer images now, but I would have deleted the rest anyway."

Philip Storry: "I prefer the first. Mostly because it has more symmetry between the sky and the water. And more importantly, in the second picture you've lost much of the gradient in the sky. That's what suggests the symmetry—we can't see the deep rich blue of the sky above, but we can see the reflection in the water. And without that additional gradient from horizon to sky in the first picture, the suggestion of that deep rich blue sky is lost. The reflection on the water becomes almost incongruous.

"No matter which way this discussion goes, what's probably more fascinating is that this is an example of how a photo isn't reality. What you're trying to convey is, you feel, better served by the second picture. And if I never saw the first, I might have been quite satisfied. But having seen the first, I now imagine cloudless skies of deep rich blues—which may not have actually been the case. As ever, the camera captures a mere slice of both time and space, and you could have been hiding all kinds of things in your framing. There could easily be a building site to either side, or behind you, ruining the idyll that's presented! And yet the discussion is about the choice of a few degrees of FOV.... Isn't photography marvelous?"

Peter Williams: "The bottom photo seems more succinct to me. It also feels better balanced across the frame. It's the one I'd choose to show from the two if they were mine."

Paul: "Your wrestling story reminded of a workshop I took with a Magnum photographer. It was made very clear I was to be shooting for at least eight hours and at least 500 photos per day, preferably more. It was also explained we had to 'work the scene' whenever we came across something like your wrestlers and visually search whilst shooting, getting closer, moving back, forward, lowering oneself until we found the perfect spot. I would end up with perhaps 150 photos by just doing this. All slightly different and usually one or two outstanding images which I would not of captured if it had not been for this approach.

"Now Mike you probably would not have worked this way due film costs and it begs to think how many still approach shooting digital with the same way they shot film. Which just isn't necessary. These requirements proved to be the most important aspect of the workshop. It's very hard to explain, but let me say my photography changed for the better. I began to see images I had never noticed before. My mental, visual and physical approach with the camera also evolved—I loosened up, I was freer. I became at one with the camera and, Mike, the whole concept kept reminding me of your advice on reading Zen in the Art of Archery. It was impressed on me I wasn't to edit whilst shooting. Just to let go and not to think too much. Shooting like this and with a daily deadline looming over made me push myself like never before."

Dogman: "I recall William Eggleston saying he only takes one shot of his subjects because it's too hard to pick the best shot when there are several. I tend to agree but I usually make a few insurance shots anyway. Shot number two would be my pick between the two shown here."

Jack Stivers: "I liked the first, but it took a bit of time to reach that conclusion. I'm a little too familiar with this process and sometimes change my mind after as much as a year (or more!) of looking at the image I originally chose."

Sharon: "I quit posting photos for critiques on forums because the advice was always to crop out the sky. That ain’t my style.  :-)  . But it does seem to be your style so I might ask why have the sky at all in this shot. I like the fence post with chicken wire in the bottom left. That could be an interesting component."

John Krill (partial comment): "You should do more of these. I'm waiting to see what everyone says about the images. It's a good way to learn composition and what folks think is the best composition."

[For the full text of partial comments, see the full Comments Section. —Ed.]