The Art of Self-Selection
There are many skills a photographer needs at her disposal – timing, framing, and post-processing, to name a few. Often overlooked, however, is the ability to be selective regarding which shots are “keepers” and which should be relegated to the proverbial trashbin. For the way I work, photos rarely get revisited. I take the shots, process them, and upload them on the same day, so if a photo doesn’t immediately make the cut, chances are it never will.This becomes all the more important when attempting abstract shots. With more traditional scenes, the captivating elements should be more obvious to the casual observer – propitious lighting, well-aligned subject matter, enticing expressions. With abstract shots, there often seems to be few tangible differences between shots, but there still has to be some criteria to determine which gets put out there in the public sphere and which ones don’t.Today, Jens and I took a walk to find a good track for me to jog. We took along our cameras, of course, and with the remarkably cold weather and the snow-laden clouds, the forest seemed to be begging for out-of-focus, ominous shots.I took 88 shots that would fall into the abstract category. Sometimes four or five shots were of the same scene, just with the focus adjusted (from completely in-focus to completely out). Othertimes, I took four or five of the same scene with just slightly different framing. So all in all, perhaps 50 different shots I could use.
Of those 50, perhaps 10 were just terrible. Particularly those that were REALLY out-of-focus were basically unusable. For instance, while I really liked the lighting of this scene, everything about it just seems wrong:
So after throwing away those 10 or so, I was basically down to 40.
Now to just the nit-picking. Sometimes it’s as easy as choosing one of a series. For instance, I had three that just had different framing (basically I had walked around in a circle while looking up the entire time – I’m sure it was good fun if anyone was watching):
To me the first was much better than the other two. Of course, someone else would surely have a different opinion, but that’s one of the interesting parts of being a photographer: we are author, editor, and publisher, all in one.
This one nearly made it for me, but in the end I just didn’t find it as interesting as the others. “Interesting” is a word I probably overuse, but to me it’s the quintessence of whether a photo “makes” it or not. It has to have something to grab me as a viewer, and this one didn’t. To put it succinctly, there’s no drama:
So after this arduous process, I was left with seven photos I liked very much. While I felt that each photo could work on its own, I was struck during post-processing by how well two seemingly different photos went with each other, so I experimented with making diptychs (when two photos are placed side-by-side). I tried different combinations and ended up with three combinations I thought worked well together; I left what I felt was the strongest to stand alone.
You can see the non-rejects here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aravis121/tags/sinisterforest/