The Contact Sheet — Old Woman of Hainan
From the Editor's Comments of LensWork #101:
There is one area of photography that is almost never championed as the crucial center of photography — editing the contact sheet. It may not be sexy to elevate the contact sheet to the realm of artmaking, but the process of editing and selection is the very axis on which the success or failure of a photographic project spins.
In this age of digital images where we have so many exposures to select from; when a photo shoot can now consist of hundreds or even thousands of images; when we no longer measure our archives in rolls but rather in gigabytes; the process of editing has quickly become the newest skill each one of us had better develop and refine with all haste.
We believe this process is so critically important that we are adding it as a series of tutorials available to members of LensWork Online. Like our Creative Labs, these will be short videos where we review a selection of images and discuss our process in selecting images for publication from amongst those submitted for us to review.
From time to time, we'll make these short tutorials available on our regular website, too, so they can be accessed by those of you who are not members of LensWork Online. Hopefully our experience as publishers will provide some valuable ideas about working your contact sheets, and make the process of editing your work easier, more enjoyable, and accomplished with more confidence.
Well, here is the first of many to come! View this new 13-minute video — available to everyone, whether you are a member of LensWork Online or not.
In this inaugural episode of The Contact Sheet, we look at selecting the best image from 28 portraits shot during a 98 second, fleeting encounter in Hainan, China.
Interesting process. This was very helpful. I'm curious: do you go back and delete any of the unpicked images? I'm especially thinking of ones with blurry elements and blown-out highlights.
Posted by: HenryH | 08/09/2012 at 08:23 AM