When less is more

I went to New York this past weekend.  In addition to selling some old gear at Adorama, I was able to spend most of Sunday walking the streets of the city, visiting the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, and shooting photos all along the way.  Selected photos are posted on my Flickr page.

When I select which photos I’m going to share, I use a short list of criteria to winnow the selection down to a workable number:

1. Identify obvious quality issues.  Anything that is out of focus, has incorrect focus, or is too under- or overexposed gets tossed. 
2. Eliminate obvious duplicates.  Most of the time, your viewers only need to see one shot of a particular item.  Six photos of your dog peeing on a fire hydrant, from three angles, is overkill.
3. Identify problems in your remaining photos.  If it’s something you can correct, do so.  If you can’t fix it, discard the image. 
4. Tell a story.  I then go through the remaining photos and put them in an order that helps to tell a story.  If you find your “story” dragging at points, you have too many similar photos and need to cull some more. 

My reasoning is pretty simple:  If people only see your best work, they won’t know you take bad photos.  Nobody has to know how often your photos are blurry.  Nobody has to see your finger in front of the lens. 

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry.  Repeat after me:  You should only show your best work.

This seems like a simple idea, but too many photographers dump all of their photos – either onto their computer, a USB drive, or directly to the Internet – without taking the time to really look at them and make decisions.  This is the digital equivalent of having to look at somebody’s vacation slides.  Usually there are too many of them, too much repetition, and the truly exceptional photos in the bunch are drowned in an ocean of mediocrity.

I took more than 160 photos when I was in New York on Sunday.  My online album contains the best 16 of those photos.  In choosing which photos to share, I ended up picking about one out of every 10 shots.  That’s a pretty good ratio. 

In general, the better your photographs, the more people want to see, and it’s always better to keep your fans wanting more than to give them more than they want.