It's Good to Look at Pictures

I did get to spend about five hours yesterday working on picture selections for our first book. (Despite being distracted. We're having some family drama.)

I'm always surprised by how easy it is to imagine editing photographs, and how different it is to actually do it. This has been consistently surprising, if such a thing is possible. To edit you have to actually do it, and to do it you need to actually look at photographs, let your visual intelligence take over.

I should back up and explain that I'm editing pictures for a book we plan to publish next Spring. One first book, as an experiment—an experiment to see how things go. Hopefully more after that, but for now, this one. I made a call for work, and got more than 2,000 suggestions from readers.

My intention has been to simply put all of the "possibles" into a "bin," if you will, for winnowing later. It hasn't gone like that. What happens is that when I put a "possible" into the document and look at it and it just doesn't fit, I know pretty quickly that it doesn't belong and then there's no more need to leave it in. So a lot of pictures have gone into the bin and then come right back out again, hours or days later. The ones that stay are the must-haves, the ones I feel rock-solid about. And once you get a certain critical mass of those, then you've got a core that dictates what else goes and what doesn't go. It becomes a simpler matter: does this go with what you already have? Does it belong with the others?

The "rejects," of course, are rejects just for this project. Accordingly, some of the pictures I really like but won't be using are suggesting other projects to me! For example, this wonderful shot by Sergio Bartelsman:

Photograph by Sergio Bartelsman

That's a great shot, and in the right company it could really sing. It doesn't "fit" in this first book, but it got my mind churning about future projects where it might fit. "Anonymity," a book of unrecognizable/recognizable people? This photograph would never do for identification purposes, but I'll bet this fellow's friends would know it's him in an instant. A book about negative space, where something in each photograph is a shape of featureless or near-featureless black? The possibilities pile up. These are just examples, and this is just one picture—a number of other pictures are likewise suggesting their own possibilities. I don't want to give up too many ideas.

Another interesting thing is happening, something I'm very familiar with and always enjoy—some photographs that didn't grab me at first are showing "legs"—staying power—while others I liked at first aren't lasting. The way I've always edited my own work (when I'm working, which isn't often any more) is to take the best shots from a recent batch of shooting and put them all up on the wall. Then I just look at them for a few days. What happens is almost like a form of magic or alchemy. I'll start out with ten or twenty shots I feel are all approximately equivalent in quality. Then, after two or three days, I'll have a handful I like and a handful I don't. Then when five or six days have passed, there will be two or three shots that I just love (well, if I'm lucky there will be), and the rest I just don't need to see any more.

It's like they sort themselves. Some of my initial selects for the book have traveled the same arc.

I did make a rookie mistake that I take full responsibility for. I should never have given the words "quiet color" as a cue. When you make a call for pictures, naturally people want to give you what they think you want. I just got loads of pictures that in some way illustrated the concept of quietude—pictures of emptiness and desolation, unpeopled landscapes and featureless seascapes, minimalism, lots of pastels and washed-out color, lonely scenes, out-of-the-way details. That wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but then, I didn't make that very clear, did I? My bad, mine alone. All I was really after were pictures that use unexaggerated color...easy on the sliders, maybe I should have said.

It's just very difficult to find the right way to give a call for work with an enabling cue rather than a limiting one. Take a look at this page to get an idea of the kind of pictures that people think illustrate the word "quiet." Nothing wrong with any of it, except that a little goes kind of a long way for me.

I can promise that our next book—assuming the first one goes okay and there is a second one—will have a very robust cue, one that will be enabling but not limiting. (In fact, I can give you that cue right now, if you want to be thinking six or nine months into the future. It's this: birds. Do not send me anything now—really, don't—but I thought you might want to set it it percolating.)

Back to Quiet Color. We're aiming for 32 or 36 pictures—the book designer will tell me exactly how many we have room for when he does his first concepts, and he hasn't started on that yet. So far I have made about half of the final selections, and about two-thirds of those come from TOP readers one way or another. But I'm in the process of going through all the submissions again, and I'm about a third of the way through that.

My mood is good, though. What overrides everything else is that it's good to look at pictures—always perks me up.

Good day to you, too.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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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Comments

[Dave Karp]

"That way when I argue with the staff I'm just talking to myself."

Sometimes those are the toughest arguments!

[Don Daso]

What a clear, concise, & cogent analysis of the editing process. Very nice, very nice...to borrow Arthur Lipsett's title.

[tex andrews]

"Take a look at this page to get an idea of the kind of pictures that people think illustrate the word "quiet." Nothing wrong with any of it, except that a little goes kind of a long way for me."

Thanks for that link. About 1/2 of those I'd cull right away (not plain enough...), but I totally love the rest. This is the sort of thing I can't get enough of, in contrast to you, Mike. Here is one of the places where I think framing in photography is a big "value add"---isolating the kind of thing we daily see and pay no attention to, yet with the aesthetic distancing provided by the photographer's selection, we get a transcendent moment/image.

Just wonderful.

[Another Phil]

Hi Mike,
Happy Christmas and New Year to you.

Do you find your mood affects the images you select? I slideshow pictures I took a while back, and sometimes find one I like once the emotion or the situation at the time has faded.
I reckon it's always more difficult to formalise a concept rather than an object as folks have differing perceptions - it's why we're so fascinating!

best wishes phil

[Winwalloe]

I'm so glad you write again about editing.

Though this subject is important for all photographers, there's so little to find about that subject for educating oneself.

How to use a camera? One billion webpages.
How to post-process your shots? As many.
How to select work for for a book, portfolio etc? Errr.

I find it sad. For instance most professional photographers have a portfolio, but many an amateur could also present their work beautifully that way. But we don't learn how to do that, and often present our work in quite messy ways (I want to say shitty): our shots on a social website won't ever look as nice as in a trully personalized place.

I hope we'll soon read about editing again!!

Best of luck on your current troubles.

[ben ng]

"our next book will have a very robust cue(ahem)" which made me think of playing pool with Hells Angels and a bevy of blondes...and then you said "birds". Goes to show that whatever the theme, you'll get grief, so just don't worry about your viewers feelings Mike, you are well respected by the majority of us so just keep on doing what you do. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
ps I can relate to the "relationship issues" stuff. It's why I gave up drinking and live happily as a reclusive artist.

[Steve Barnett]

I remember at the time you announced the book and thought, 'yes I have some pictures that could be called quiet colour' . Then I thought, 'yes, but they are not about quiet colour, it is just incidental'. As such it would misrepresent the photograph based on a coincidence.

It's not for instance like making a selection of pictures based on a concrete subject, one that could be represented in full colour, quiet colour, or even B&W, perhaps maybe 'what I did on 4th of July'? To have any satisfaction in having a picture reproduced in a book surely it requires the picture to stand on what it was about originally, not what it became about by chance selection to fit into an artificial category? The photograph has its meaning stripped away like 'music for elevators' , where almost any song can be made as bland as the next, but in this case it is the inclusion of an image into a book. And it would hardly matter if a soc doc picture got included from a war zone, because by its context it would be 'about' quiet colour. Neutralising any covert message in the common message and title. I can't see how it would work, or why anybody would want their photograph to work in the same context, unless miraculously you found the motherload of photographers who's work is based on 'quiet colour'.

[So you're saying I should not have used those words as the cue in the call for work. Which is precisely what I just said in this post. --Mike]

[Michael Perini]

Got It !
Already working on my entry for the next book.

An unmarried pastel colored bird, with no sign of bird family drama.
I think it's a lock.....
....I'm not being too literal am I ?
Nah....

[You might be, yes. Bird family drama I have no sensitivity to. And a picture of happily married lovebirds will work. --Mike]

[k4kafka]

Reminds me of the Monopoly millionaire guy...without his top hat.

[Steve Rosenblum]

This is somewhat off topic, but, the best program for reviewing, assessing, comparing, and rating photographs by a large margin is Photo Mechanic by CameraBits. Peter Turnley turned me onto it--he uses it in his workshops to rapidly review and rate his students daily shoots. It is pretty much universally used by photojournalists, sports shooters, and anyone who needs to review and sort a large number of images efficiently. It is better than Photoshop or Lightroom for this purpose mainly because it is blazingly fast. You just drag a folder of image files onto the program icon in in literally a second or so it generates beautiful previews. It provides very efficient rating tools, has a bunch of programmable automation built in, and can export to anything while renaming, adding metadata, making backups, etc.. It would be worth trying for your project just to use the viewing function. I use it to do my viewing, sorting, rating, and tagging and then bring the photos into LR or PS to work on. Check it out, they have a 30 day free demo. (I have no relationship with the company, they just make a great product).

[Dave in NM]

Birds, huh? Hopefully Ctein's bird picture will be in there.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/.a/6a00df351e888f883401901e1b6001970b-800wi

[Rowan]

Birds eh? My favourite picture of mine has a bird. I'll keep it under my hat for now, but once you announce the call for submissions, I'm on it!

Merry Christmas to you and yours, Mike

[Bob Smith]

When you said you wanted "quiet color" photos my first thought was "pastels".

Found a scene that I thought was perfect, a house w/porch and swing in soft shades of green with a light always burning in the room visible through a window, shot it, got the film back and the shots were out of focus......

Going to reshoot it this spring. Your quiet color has turned in to a project for me.

cheers, Bob

[jim]

Birds? Mike, I think you may be setting us up to buy 400&600mm lenses through your affiliate links and make you wealthy so you can quit writing TOP! Say it aint so! ( at least about the end of TOP)the wealthy part would be OK with all your readers!

[Okay, I will...it ain't so. [g] --Mike]

[Miserere]

As the wise man once said: You can see a lot by just looking.

As for the next book, I have exactly one bird picture in my archives that I consider artistic, so you better damn well like it, Mike!

[Patrick Dodds]

Off topic: Happy Christmas Mike - thanks for another year of entertaining posts and thought provocation.