Final Edit (Part 1)

Well, this is (nearly) it. I have taken around 800 photos as part of this project and now it is time to try and make sense of them.

Technically, they are better than I expected. My most frequent errors have been in low light conditions, usually because of not increasing ISO to allow more flexibility. My Canon 5D (Mk III) is more capable than I give it credit for. I have come up against the limitations of my lenses a little – I don’t have anything really fast. Even so, most of what I shot has ended up on contact sheets with surprisingly few images hitting the cutting room floor for purely technical reasons.

That should be good news but it just makes moving to ‘first edit’ more difficult. Following my usual workflow of ‘quick and dirty’ edits as soon as possible after shooting and re-visiting these after each successive shoot, has left me with around 120 ‘possibles’ – that is to say, images that are strong enough, as single images, to hold my attention.

Moving from single images to some form of ‘collection’; of trying to find or impose a coherent narrative of connected images is not something I have ever done before. I haven’t even filled up a photo album in the last 20 years. There was a narrative structure implicit in the original design of the project but to follow this too closely would have resulted in the inclusion of weak images (for completeness/ representativeness) and/ or distortion to favour ‘stronger’ individual images. I wanted something that was more expressive than literal.

To see better what I had, I followed the process demonstrated in class and spread out all the ‘possibles’ on a table and looked for an aesthetic rather than a linear coherence of time and place. Driven by considerations of colour, subject and ‘typicality’ I wanted to choose images that together rather than separately told the story that I have to tell.

It was hard to leave out some of my favourites; images from days when I was on a roll or images that ‘worked’ when rendered in a moody black and white that I really have decided don’t correspond to my experience of the places I had visited.

I have made a selection. I am not going to post it here yet as I want to have all the images subject to a wider critique in class next week.

After that will come the question of the form in which to submit my final edit.