August Tip

Avoiding the Digital Avalanche – Choosing Your Best

One of my first tips was a method for going through your pictures multiple times, from first download to later reviews, systematically removing the ones that did not work, or that you didn’t need to remember the moment. As a follow up, I’d like to talk about choosing your best work to share.

Here are three criteria, and one rule:

Criteria:
1. Emotional Impact
2. Compositional Excellence
3. Story

The Rule:
1. A single image of a single moment.

Emotional impact is first because the purpose of photography is to communicate. A great many technical and compositional flaws can be forgiven if an image has great emotional impact. How do you judge emotional impact? Two ways. First, your own reaction. Second, the reaction of trusted viewers. Two of my most successful prints never would have put to paper if not for the input of trusted viewers. As the photographer, it can be hard to judge your own work. Seek input as well trust yourself.

Compositional Excellence is self explanatory. Balance, dynamism, tension, strength, motion, color, focus, etc. Look at the best photographers’ work and judge your composition against their finest pieces.

Story is a bit more complex. Does the piece invoke additional imagery? Do people associate it with other stories? (like this month’s print did with Greek mythology) Do you sense a narrative when you look at it? Can you sense what happened just before, or what might happen next?

Share only one image of a single moment for the simple fact that multiple images of the same moment dilute the impact of those images in direct proportion to the number of shots of it being shared.