The Online Photographer

Editing by Magic

Carl's recent posts about editing and the comments they've evoked have brought up so many thoughts that I could probably write five long posts about it. If not ten. (If you just blurted out, "oh, no!" never fear, that wasn't actually a threat.)

One thing leapt to mind. I've been taking golf lessons recently for the first time in my life (it's never too late for golf; it is too late for platform diving), and one thing my pro keeps saying is "make it yours." That is, he wants me to work out things for myself. And of course, each of us needs to "make our own" a great many facets of our pursuit / passion / profession / hobby / diversion of photography, starting with how serious we're going to be about it and what our aims are. The comments to Carl's posts make it clear that a lot of people have developed their own methods of editing. Which of course doesn't mean that it still might not help to talk about it.

I wanted to post a sort of counterpoint to Carl's article, in order to point out that he's talking about working out a method and then following the method through. He's not saying, "use the software I use, follow my method slavishly."

Sorry about this overlong preamble, but I also need to make a disclaimer: I'm not a guru. My way is not the right way. So don't take what I'm about to tell you as gospel; don't even take it as a recommendation, unless you want to. I'm not trying to tell you the "right" way to do things, even if I believed there was such a thing, which I don't.

Get to the point, Mike!
Anyway, when I had my chops up, here's how I worked. I developed either one or two tanks of film (three rolls of 35 exposures* each per tank) once every few nights. (Less in winter, more in summer.) I'd hang the film in the closet to dry, clip it and put it into PrintFile pages the next morning (this was my most hated photographic chore, by the way), then, when dark fell, I'd make proof sheets. (My darkrooms, always crude affairs, were almost never light-tight enough to use when the sun was out.)

In looking at the proof sheets, I had a couple of rules for myself. First, I had to loupe every frame. Second, I had to mark between one and six pictures per roll. It didn't matter if it was the stupidest, ugliest roll of useless pictures I'd ever taken, I had to find at least one frame to workprint. And I strongly resisted making workprints of more than six frames per roll. Oh, of course if I really, really had to see that seventh or eighth frame, I'd do it; but the reason for the six-frames rule was that if I marked 20 frames or 25 frames on every roll, it would be too much work to workprint (and too expensive), and I'd procrastinate and never get to it. So I had a method: every frame that interested me under the loupe first got a single cross mark in the corner; if there were more than six, I had to winnow them down to six, then I would put a second cross-mark, making an "X", on the ones to be printed.

Do you see that those "rules" were just an effort to cope with my particular psychology, my personal weaknesses? I didn't want to be tempted to throw a roll aside just because there wasn't much good on it; I knew I'd miss some good frames that way. I had to force myself to deal with every roll when workprinting. And I didn't want to trigger my tendency to procrastinate. These are my own personal solutions to my own personal idiosyncrasies. They have no more significance than that.

I was an effing ninja at workprinting. I could make twenty prints in an hour just cruising; thirty to forty an hour if I was trying. After years in the darkroom, I had no trouble looking at the neg against the safelight and setting the time and contrast to "good enough" with nothing more than a glance. Most of my workprints look pretty good, too, if I do say so.

Workprints. I made a gazillion of these over the years. No exaggeration**.

So here's the thing I started out to say: I have to have prints in order to edit.

And here's why. If I took, say, fifteen of those 8x10 workprints and taped them all up on the wall, they would all look more or less the same to me at first. And I'd look at them. Then I'd look at them some more. And some more. Gradually, I would start to get interested in a few of them more than others, and some would begin to drop into the don't-care category. And this is the mystery: after about three or four days of looking at a batch of workprints, chances are I would love two or three of them and not care at all about the rest. 

How did this happen? I really have no idea. Still don't, to this day.

But I could depend on it.

I finally decided that it was just not entirely conscious. It's not like I was "deciding" which pictures were "good" and which weren't; it's just that some of them had that "it," whatever it is that I personally happen to find gratifying about photographs, and the others didn't. 

There have been all kinds of things I've learned about myself along the way. For one thing, "good" pictures—the solid, good-looking, pictures-that-look-like-everybody-else's-good-pictures pictures—seldom made it for me. And, the things I liked were often quiet, sometimes too quiet for others.

I sometimes liked failures, too...pictures that were intriguing for some reason but...well, bad. I had a separate category for these, called "significant failures."

Sometimes I'd put 20 prints up and, after three days, it had become obvious that none of them were any good. That was always dispiriting, but it wasn't all that unusual.

So what accounts for that magical "sorting" process that almost always occurred half a week or so after I slapped a bunch of seemingly identical-quality workprints up on the wall and just looked and looked and looked? I just don't know. I only know that it was the way my brain worked when it came to photographs. 

Paper is wealth
The end of the process was that when I could spare the time and the money (paper was wealth, for most of my adult life; I almost never had enough paper) I would go into the darkroom and make a fine (finished) print from the negative. I always had a reputation as a fine printer—it was how I made a good bit of my living for a good long stretch, and I'm happy to say that some prints made by me reside in some very prestigious museums and collections—but I never enjoyed this part quite as much. It was too final, and few fine prints were fine enough, if you get my drift. I probably only made "finished" fine prints out of, I don't know, maybe a third of my sorted "selects." In a sense, there was no reason to—I didn't have shows, and nobody bought them. I was just doing it because I liked it. (Same reason you play golf. Who cares except you?) But workprinting for me was the center around which everything else revolved. I loved seeing what the negatives looked like, and I loved anticipating the magic "editing" process that would follow. 

I can't do the same thing on the computer screen. I have no good method there. That's not a value judgment, not an anti-digital comment. It's just a fact. I need prints on the wall. I need to be able to do lots of looking. It's just the way I am.

I've never counted exactly, but I believe I have about 85,000 negatives***, and although I've lost or left behind most of the workprints I've made, I probably have a few thousand of those hanging around the house. I really should be responsible to that work, and attempt to edit a book of pictures out of it—maybe even two. It's another one of those things I've always put off to "someday." That's the kind of task that requires that you be systematic and organized, and I am neither. I'm not looking forward to trying. But...someday.

I hope it won't be hard to see how very different Carl's method of editing a large set of digital captures (something I've never even done, because I've never made a large set of digital captures) is from my method of working with rolls of 35mm film.

We're all different. You've got to make it yours.

Mike

*Only 35 frames fit on the kind of PrintFile sheet I used, so that's how many pictures I shot on a roll, never 36.

**Well, slight exaggeration.

***Sounds like a lot, but it only averages to about two and a half rolls a week over twenty years.

ADDENDUM: A great tip for those still doing 35mm black-and-white. If you happen to use an Omega or LPL 4x5 enlarger (the latter being the best enlargers ever made, and now imported into the U.S. by Omega, formerly by Saunders, they of the easels), get yourself an LPL 4x5 glass carrier (has to be the LPL one, the Omega won't work). If you cut your negatives in strips of six, and you carefully overlap the clear sprocket-holed edges of the film, you can just fit nine 35mm frames into the carrier. Then you can enlarge all nine frame together onto whatever size sheet of paper you can afford and want to handle—11x14 or 16x20. Four sheets and you've done a roll of 36. It replaces both contact sheet and work prints. I could never quite get it together to work this way, but I always wanted to. It's very luxurious and very nice.

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Featured Comment by Gary: "I agree about the importance of work prints, but I still find the digital work flow to be a big improvement to that of 35mm film.

"The thing is, I don't use on-screen viewing to replace the work print stage, but rather the contact sheet stage. The curse of 35mm is that you can't really see what you've got squinting at a contact sheet with a lupe and so, must make enlargements of many frames just to see what's there. Doing the initial viewing on screen seems a big improvement to me.

"With digital, the second stage (work prints) is still there and just as important, but getting there is easier. And not just with regards to selection, but physically, too. I can shoot JPEG or JPEG + raw, use the JPEG for intitial viewing and make a workprint from it at the push of a button. Keep the raw for the final print if needed.

"I'm amused when I sometimes hear people on forums ask how they can make a contact sheet from their digital files."

Zen Slap

By Carl Weese

Some of the comments to my recent post about editing made me realize that I was writing from an underlying assumption about the nature of editing that is not necessarily obvious to the reader. The comments recommending various ways to edit out mistakes remind me of something important in my photographic life from about twenty-five years ago.

I had the opportunity to show David Vestal in-progress work on a personal project. At that point I had been intensely involved with photography for two-thirds of my life; I had been a working professional for a dozen years. David spent time with the pictures, and then, instead of talking about them directly, asked about my editing. "Do you look for mistakes, and get rid of them? Or do you look for good stuff to hold on to?"

I was dumbfounded, like after the Zen master's slap upside the head. There was no middle ground, no gray area, no way around it: I had never in my life thought of the editing process as anything but taking a berserker's broad-axe to the shoot, eliminating anything that showed the slightest weakness, the least flaw or error. David recommended I start over from scratch with this material, and look for all the good things instead of editing by fault-finding. Once the pictures with good stuff in them were found, I could start to decide whether each one had, on balance, enough good stuff to outweigh any bad stuff I would previously have rejected it for. This was a radical change of thought. Instantly, I knew he was right.

What I've come to understand in the years since, is that editing by fault-finding traps you into what you already know, so is an impediment to discovery and advancement. From the beginning I'd been suspicious of "rules," but editing by negation sneaked a bunch of stupid rules right past me and into my practice. To edit by fault-finding is to encase yourself in foregone conclusions—you might as well be insisting on The Rule of Thirds, or Single Center of Interest—but to edit as an exploration of the take for what actually worked, for what you found that you didn't already know, is a voyage of discovery. It's a crucial difference.

Carl

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Editing a Large Set of Digital Captures

By Carl Weese

One of the really positive things about digital capture is that in a situation where you'd like to shoot freely, digital "free film" lets you shoot with downright reckless abandon. (Of course capture isn't completely free: memory cards cost money even though you get to reuse them, and you need to store multiple copies of your capture files, preferably on more than one kind of media, but that's still almost free compared to film and processing.) Not all situations call for high volume shooting, and it is possible to overshoot. Working too quickly, making too many captures without thinking clearly about them can result in getting everything except the right shot. But there are plenty of times when there are many things to photograph and more than one worthwhile viewpoint or moment for each, so the card starts to fill up with a lot of captures. This can become quite a headache once all those pictures are downloaded to the computer.

The trouble with a dense forest of captures is how to find the best trees. There's also the issue of "what was I really trying to do with this shoot?" That question may not apply to conceptual artists who start with an idea and set up a shot for the camera, but for any photographer who likes to work by going out into the world just looking for the unexpected, the unedited take can be completely confusing. The whole collection is overwhelming so the trick is to slice it into manageable chunks. The chunks I look for are "Situations" (the word "Subjects" might seem more descriptive for someone else's work but I'll coin the Situation usage here). A weekend excursion to an interesting city, or a road trip, or a wedding or a soccer game—just about any shoot that results in a large number of pictures can be divided into Situations.

To illustrate my approach to editing large sets of pictures I'll show screen grabs from the Bridge module of Photoshop CS3 because that's the browser I use. You can find equivalent tools in other browsers and adapt my suggestions accordingly. I'll show the folder holding my shoot from a day spent at a country fair a few weeks ago. In Bridge, I set up a Workspace that has some housekeeping panels on the left, a large pane with twenty good size thumbnails on the right, and a Preview pane in the middle. The selected thumbnail shows at a more legible size in the Preview pane.

First I want to get a general feel for the shoot, so I scan through the whole folder by selecting a thumbnail in the top row and then using the keyboard down arrow to advance, which means I see every fourth frame I've shot. That way I'll probably see at least one capture from each Situation I worked on. I'll move sideways if needed to catch situations that have only one or two shots, but the idea is a rapid overview of the whole folder at Preview size.

Next step is to start over again at the beginning. In the first screen grab there are five frames of "the giant pumpkin Situation," frames 6–10. Frames 11–15 are of "the poultry barn Situation." I use the right/left arrows to flip through each set quickly, first to last, then last to first, like a rapid back and forth slide show, all the while staring at the Preview window. Don't use the mouse to select the thumbnails or you'll have to keep looking away from the Preview pane. I'm not trying to do a detail-oriented analysis here but to get a gestalt impression of this slice of the shoot. Often one shot just stands out as best, so I "rate" it with a single star (Bridge allows five rating levels, 0-4). Sometimes two or three are in really close contention so I mark more than one. If I don't really like any of them I still find the least unsuccessful shot and give it a star, so the Situation itself remains in the tentative edit. I work all the way through the shoot, not necessarily in one session! When you find it hard to pick the best shots, or to see where the Situations should be divided, go do something else for a while.

(As an aside, if you can find the discipline, put off this whole process for a while after making the pictures. The great Josef Sudek said he didn't look at his pictures until at least six months after shooting them, because he wanted to encounter just the picture, not his memory of the situation he made it in. Deadlines are one of the negative things about professional photography, a bug, not a feature, so if you have the luxury of waiting, take advantage of it.)

Once I've gotten all the way through the folder, I filter for the single-star pictures, and Bridge hides all the rest. I'm not deleting anything, just hiding the potential out-takes.

The full take of 671 pictures has been reduced to a much more comprehensible 131. Almost every frame represents a different Situation. By looking at the work Situation after Situation I begin to get a much clearer idea of what I was up to during the shoot. I see my thought process, I can decide which ideas, which trails I was following, were the most productive. Where I still have more than one shot marked from a Situation, it can be helpful to switch from viewing the choices sequentially to a direct comparison, so I select both at once and Bridge displays two good size Previews.

The next step is to start from the beginning again and start putting two-star ratings on the best Situations, then filter again to show only these. Up to now I've just been looking for good pictures, good picture Situations, in a general sort of way. But now it's important to think carefully about intention and audience. My thought about these pictures was that I'd like to use them on one of my blogs, WPII: Pictures in Public. This has a big influence on the next step in the edit. For example, a picture that depends on lots of tiny details won't work in a little 800-pixel wide blog presentation. Another good picture might not fit with the theme of the blog, in which case I might mark it with three stars, indicating "good shot, but not for WPII."

Now it's time start over once again, to work through this much tighter edit of two-star files. At each one, I remove the filtering so I can see all the frames that I shot in each of these best Situations. My initial choice may have been wrong. More important, I now understand the shoot much better from the exercise of finding the best Situations, and that may influence my choice of what is really the most important shot in each. A picture that didn't seem the best before may resonate well with a picture from another Situation, which means it now becomes the better choice if the pictures are to be collected into a group or series like a succession of blog posts. Now is also the time to look for small technical flaws like focus or movement errors. If the picture that seemed best in step one is off focus, but step two told me the Situation was one of the best in the shoot, there may be another frame that gets what I really care about getting from the Situation.

Filtering for the double star files hides everything except the pictures selected to post at the blog. These can be copied to a new folder and run through a batch action to prepare small JPEGs for posting. Bridge also allows you to place color "labels" on individual files. If I had another potential purpose for these pictures, say a brochure promoting the fair, the final tight edit for that could be labeled red. Then filtering for double star would bring up the edit for my blog, filtering for red would bring up the edit for the brochure, even if some pictures appear in both edits. Note that "the pumpkin Situation" in the first screen gab above doesn't make it to this edit—I like the shot but it doesn't fit the theme of WPII.

That's my process, in detail, for editing large groups of captures. But it's the process, not the details, that matters. You can use any file management system and adapt its tools to the purpose. To review, the first step is to slice the take into bite size chunks by dividing the shoot into groups of pictures, then make a tentative pick of the best picture in each group. Then pick the very best of these, or the ones that fit a specific intention or audience you have in mind. Finally, go back and compare each of these survivor pictures with the rest of its shooting Situation and make sure it really is the best choice. Editing a large folder of files can seem like a daunting task, but this process not only cuts the task down to size, it gives us an opportunity to learn about our pictures. Long before the advent of digital capture, David Vestal wrote that one very good reason for photographers to print their own pictures (in the traditional darkroom) was to learn about them. Editing a large take on the computer can also be a valuable learning experience rather than mere drudgery.

Last note—the longer you let this process take, the more time you let pass between shooting and editing, or between the editing steps, the better your edit is likely to be.

Carl

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Featured Comment by Ken White: "I recently put together my first large scale (for me) portrait project using a similar multi-pass filtering technique. In my case I started with four years of images in 12 different folders. I went from over a thousand images down to 43 for the final selection. The process of filtering the images and looking at them in great detail helped me see problems and opportunities that will be reflected in my next project. It was a great learning experience."

Featured Comment by Mike in Montreal: "Here's what I do:

1. Pre-shoot checklist.

2. Go to event/interesting location.

3. Shoot at the speed the situation requires. 'Chimp' religiously.

3a. Allow myself to get sidetracked.

4. Sit somewhere. Use camera to edit out junk.

5. Go home. Edit out more sub-grades using camera.

6. Remove card. Load remaining images to a subfolder.

7. Bring into Lightroom using safe all-purpose pre-set.

8. Divide into categories using 'Collections.'

9. Using 'Print' module (with large single-shot template), flip through each collection, assigning the color Yellow to the keepers (based on whatever criteria suits the moment).

10. Filter to Yellow only, develop each image, assigning the color Green when I'm 95–99% satisfied with the result. Not all the Yellows make it this far.

11. Now I look at my Greens as a photo editor would (the print module makes a nice light table) and choose what will best make the story. Mark these as Blue.

12. Final tweaking of the Blues, send to Photoshop.

"I developed this method over time on my own, based on my own quirks and habits. When I read other photogs' workflows, I feel a vague anxiety, so I'm not recommending my approach to anyone here. Mr Weese's tips offer good clues, as do mine, but shooters must find their own way from concept to presentation. Preferably one that keeps the creative process flowing and doesn't throw up psychological obstacles."

Flow Structures, Wrinkled Circles, and Teddy Bears in Space

The Winning Photo: Ben Sheppard and Robert Howshall's Pebble Project

Photo contests are a dime a dozen (and typically $10 to $30 a shot), but here's one that's a little different: the Nokia Photography Competition at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, in the UK. The criteria: "We are searching for an image that relates to research or teaching in the Department or engineers out in the field, which may be beautiful, fascinating, intriguing, amusing, or possibly all of these things." Check out the winners for yourself (noting that this is one case where reading the descriptions adds to the pictures).

Mike
(Thanks to Ted Johnson)

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An Aerial for Your Portfolio

I'm far from an expert in aerial photography, but I just wanted to add one small comment to the previous post: having one aerial photograph in your portfolio can be a real plus for you, and I recommend it. For many years I've had just one single aerial photo in mine*, but people almost always linger over it and ask about it.

In general, photographers want their portfolios to say "I'll do anything," and that's usually a mistake. (Have I written a post yet about why you should never have one wedding photograph in your portfolio? If I haven't, I've been meaning to.) Your portfolio should target a specific clientele and work to convince that clientele that you're the absolute best person for the job at hand—it shouldn't be a hodgepodge of jobber work of various kinds. However, having a token aerial shot might well be the exception to that rule. It really does say to clients "I can do anything" in a meaningful way. Generally, amateur photographers who do casual pro work once in a while aren't trusted with the budget for a plane or a helicopter. An aerial implies that you were trusted with just such a important job—even if you weren't!

Adding one aerial shot to your portfolio isn't as hard as it sounds. You might have a friend who flies. Small planes and helicopters can be rented for not that much money. And there are even things like biplane rides at air shows and tethered hot air balloon rides that can get you way up in the air for very little inconvenience or expense. Best of all, while it's just as hard to get a great aerial shot as it is to get any other kind of great picture, getting a good one is fairly easy...lots of things look more interesting from high above, as most of us know from peering out the window of a descending airliner when the air is clear and the light is nice.

A shot not many of us could get: Door Gunner Looks at Baghdad, by John Camp

Anyway, I highly recommend adding an aerial shot to your general portfolio. It's unlikely to get you any work shooting them, but it says good things about you all the same. 

Mike

*I'd show it to you if my darned scanner worked, but oh well.

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Featured Comment by Dave: "As a former flight instructor I can tell you that if show up at your local airport, a flight instructor will be happy to help you take aerial photos. Most flight instructors will do just about anything to log additional flight time. A photo flight is considered a cherry assignment for a starving flight instructor. It beats teaching someone how to land.

"Some tips to get the most out of your photo flight:

1) Plan ahead—an hour of flight time will cost from $60–$120. You'll not want to waste a minute. Spend at least an hour with your pilot planning the photo mission. The pilot will need to have a plan for navigating to the photo site and dealing with local air traffic control.

2) Schedule to fly during good lighting conditions. Early morning or late afternoon.

3) Get some latitude and longitude info from google maps. Most aircraft are now equipped with GPS. If you come prepared with lat and long data you'll save the pilot a lot of work and possible wasted flight time.

4) Ask if you can fly the plane. A flight instructor won't mind handing the controls over for awhile and teaching you some turns or something more exciting if you're brave."

Featured Comment by Steve Renwick: "As a Cessna driver, I'd like to add a few comments.

"Make sure that you and the pilot are on the same page at all times, i.e., you both know how low the plane will fly, you ask before opening the window, etc. Never surprise the pilot.

"If you are not accustomed to small planes, it would be a really good idea to take a ride without your camera at first, just so you know what to expect.

"As somebody else said, looking through the viewfinder whilst going in circles is a very good way to upset your stomach. Don't try to tough it out, as that won't work. Look up at the horizon and ask the pilot to fly straight and level for a while. A little delay is better than the alternative."

Featured Comment by Stan Semuskie: "I agree with your comment about the aerial photo in your portfolio. A couple years ago I received a call from Forbes.com to shoot a photo of the home of one of the richest guys in the U.S. I was kind of taken aback by the request, and asked if the person would set up the shoot. She said just rent a plane or helicopter, find the house and take a picture. I still wasn't convinced that I could do it so I called the local airport, in Hillsboro, Oregon, and much to my surprise I could rent a helicopter with a pilot for $125/hr, and they would only charge me for what I used in 6-minute increments. I did the job, used up the whole hour and shot much more than the house—I also shot my company, my house, and all my friends' houses from the air. It was one of the best experiences I have had.

"By the way, the person whose house I shot was Phil Knight (founder of Nike). He just happened to live in my town of Hillsboro, and I was lucky enough to get the job from Forbes. I would recommend anyone to call around and see what it costs for an hour of air time. I think many will be very much surprised at how inexpensive it can be."