Editing is one of the most important parts of photography but a skill few photographers learn to master. Back in the good old days of photojournalism most photographers would hand off their film to someone else to process and edit. Today photographers are expected to come up with an edit on their own. One thing I learned as a young freelance photojournalist is to never give the editors too many choices because inevitably they will choose the “wrong” picture.
But what is the “right” photo? It’s a question my students often ask. Like everything else about photography it is subjective. The “best” photo is not always the loveliest, or the most direct. What makes a photograph good, at least when you are editing, is how the image conveys the information you are trying to communicate. How well does the image balance its visual elements? Something which is often overlooked is how well does the image work within the context of a photo essay or larger group of images? This is one of the most important issues because even if you are just posting your images on Facebook or Flickr nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to see ten nearly identical shots of the same thing, no matter how pretty you think that sunset was or how lovely your new kitten is. The inability to edit, to make a choice and stick by it, is the hallmark of an amateur.
For this personal project I’ve been working on I have faced the time honored problem of what to do when you have a lot of good pictures of the same thing. My subject, the wonderful Paul “Spazzy” Winston, is a pianist and composer. Naturally he spends a great deal of time tickling the ivories and just as naturally I spent a lot of time photographing him doing so. Here are a few images, all of them great in their own way.
And these aren’t even all of them!
See my point? Including even three of these images in a 15 or 20 image essay would be incredibly repetitive although they all have some interesting points. My challenge is to find one or perhaps two images which are interesting enough to represent everything else the other images convey. This is where I use criteria like composition and visual beauty to narrow the field down. Some images are nicer than others while still having the same information. Other images carry more emotional or metaphorical weight. Using that reasoning these three images make the cut.
There is something very pure about the first image. It is nice, simple and spare. At the same time I feel like it can be anyone’s hands. The photo while nice is not that intimate or compelling.
The second photo is a lot more interesting, at least to me. It is up close and personal; we can really start to see the hairs and veins that make this hand unique. Also the position of the fingers make for a lovely form themselves and begin to transform the hand into a kind of metaphor.
The third image is the one I like the best. I don’t think it is the most visually appealing but look at those hands, those veins! The crossed hands upend our sense of what a pianist does and creates a very dynamic image, one that we really have to spend time with to understand all the nuances. This photo does what I think all good art does; show us something we think we know in a new and interesting way.
And that’s our lesson for today! Thanks for coming!
