25 List Done?

Has everybody who wants to play my Little Game completed their list of 25 categories? Because I'll be posting Part 2 (of 3) tomorrow morning.

I've finished mine, although I could work on it some more.

Part 2  still requires some work, but it should be easier. Part 3, which requires no work, makes the point—and will engender the discussion.

The concept of this Game isn't my invention, by the way...it comes from a world-renowned expert in an entirely different field. Who I will name and give credit to, of course.

Mike

ADDENDUM: I've been sick today, and got stuck full of holes and now I'm all sore.

But for an excellent, excellent example of what we're on about here, take a look at James Cockroft's blog post about his 25 categories.

He writes, "I limited it to film photographs scanned since 1/1/2016 and had more than 12,000 images to look through. It took about two hours and was by turns exhilarating and depressing. I ended up with about 35 categories, which I massaged and combined down into 25, some/many of which overlap somewhat." Note how impressionistic some of his categories are ("Places I Remember (even if I don’t)—vacant, unused now; buildings that used to be something else; nostalgia, even if fiction") and how specific others are ("Domesticated Animals—especially when looking into the camera or otherwise engaged with the viewer").

The images he used for illustrations in his blog post were "just the first that caught my eye as fitting the category."

You don't need to go so far just to play the little game, but it's really nice to have such a thorough example of the process to serve as a model or demonstration. Many thanks to James.

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

Harsh reality

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

Geoff Wittig: "Huh. I initially blew off this exercise because about 90% of what I photograph could be lumped under 'landscape.' I figured it had nothing to teach me. But after thinking a bit and looking through my photo archive, I'm surprised to find I can easily identify at least 15–18 distinct subject areas that are pretty well represented. It's partly a matter of 'splitting rather than lumping.' For instance, portraits of trees, which really aren't the same thing as generic landscapes. And carefully composed forest scenes, which are really quite different from tree portraits, with a different compositional and creative mindset. And I was quite surprised to see how many 'found abstracts' I've shot over the years. Not my favorites, but there they are. Dang it, Mike. You're making me think again."

Comments

[s.wolters]

Only two categories so far:
1. With my wife
2.Without my wife

[Ken Bennett]

I got my list done Saturday evening. I've been using Lightroom at home for years, and have a pretty organized archive going back to 2000 or so. This made viewing the photos fairly straightforward.

What made this difficult was the limited scope of my personal work. Seriously. I have lots of photos of our travels and our long backpacking trips, the usual family portraits, and a couple of long-running personal projects. But most of my creative energy goes into making photos at work. When I'm not working, I tend to make very perfunctory images. But I gave it some serious consideration, and decided that I could include a fair amount of my work photos because they really do "gratify my soul" to quote Mike's original post.

One interesting aspect of this was seeing just how many photos I have that use a particular technique, or "see" light in a certain way. I'm having a hard time deciding if this is "my personal style" or just laziness.

[Qaswar]

Apple Iphone xsApple Iphone xs have a great camera for hd photographs try it as soon as possible.

[Moose]

Whom

Standards!

Even better, To whom . . .

[Michael Miller]

Only you know where you're going with this, but my categories immediately revealed that compounding blurry elemental categories usually produces my most focused (and favorite) images. I shoot a lot of architecture, repeating elements, unusual perspectives, juxtaposed ancient/modern, b&w, high contrast, for example. My best architectural images comprise three or more of those simultaneously. Interested to see if that figures into your three-part strategy. Really enjoying this exercise, by the way!

[Rich Beaubien]

Okay despite my inability to get the required 25 (I really don't want to talk about it), I expect to come up to the full amount shortly...

[Peter Conway]

For anyone who regularly uses keywords in Lightroom, expanding the Keyword List is a good way to jump start the process - you've already been doing the thinking/categorizing as you've gone along. It even gives you a count of how many images you've tagged with each keyword.

[Rodolfo Canet]

I wonder if, in this game, the same photographs can be in two or more categories at the same time. For instance, using the very nice James' example you featured, it's easy to see that photos 1 & 2 in 'Landscapes' and 2&3 in 'Rain/Mist/Fog' could also form a category called something like 'roads going undetermined somewhere'. In fact, this is what we so when we assign keywords to our images...

[We'll get to that. Under the heading of "synthesis." --Mike]

[Henk]

The added keywords to my digital images over the years is a great help to produce the list. I exported the keyword list to a .txt file and only had to condense the list to 25 items.

[Bruce Walker]

Your 25-List game arrived at a good point for me. I'm in a shooting hiatus as I contemplate, take stock, introspect and generally think about what I've been doing and where I might go next.

I bet that playing along could yield some valuable input so I have a tentative list of 27 which I will revise some more today before part 2 shows up. Thanks, Mike!