Paul's Film Photography Blog

So, today’s topic is editing, and I’m not talking about making changes in Photoshop. I’m talking about deciding what gets to be seen by anyone else and what languishes in the binders.

Sad to say, not every photograph I make is worth the silver in the negative. Some of them aren’t even worth the gelatin the silver is suspended in. Some of them were never intended to have any higher purpose than being a snapshot, something with value to me and my loved ones but of no consequence to anyone else. The world at large doesn’t need to see the 500th photo of my cat, or 400th photo of my granddaughter unless I knocked it out of the park and made something which can touch the viewer’s emotions even when they don’t know the subject.

A not-quite-select. I like the composition with the leading lines and I like the tones I got from the negative. But in a ruthless editing environment, those parked cars in the background were the difference between a thumbs-up and thumbs-down. It's a tough life, being a photograph.

Shooting film may make me think a bit more about whether I need to bother opening the shutter at all but I’m not perfect. If I was, I’d be deciding which work to exhibit at the American Museum of Photography while fending off requests from Joe McNally and David Hobby to teach them everything I know about lighting. Speaking of pros, just ask one how many shots they make versus how many the public or their clients get to see.

It’s easy to slip into the thinking that “well, if I just tweaked it a bit this way, and adjusted that there, and did some other stuff, this might be a worthy photo”. I’ve spent more than a little time doing the Photoshop equivalent of polishing a turd. 9 times out of 10 I turned a bad photo into a bad photo with obvious, cheesy post-processing and several hours of my time sunk into it just to add salt to the wound.

It’s also easy in the modern, everything online world to slip into thinking that it’s OK to post everything you ever produce because it’s so easy to do, and costs nothing. But that’s not what I want to do either. Just because I can post a photograph to Flickr doesn’t mean I should. I’m rapidly coming around to the idea that, if it isn’t worth printing and showing to people, it’s not worth sharing online. I don’t want my moments of inspiration to be lost in a sea of near-misses.

Which leads to the ruthless editing part. If something is print-worthy that implies that I will take the time and materials to print and present it. Not being of limitless resource I can’t print everything which I like, so guess what? I have to edit down to a small core of work. This is not an easy process because I’m editing from a selection of work I really like and the photographs which don’t make the cut may never be seen beyond the confines of my computer/light box/contact sheets. The end result, of course, will be a concentrated selection of what I consider to be my best work. Something dangerously close to being a portfolio, even.

So it’s hard, yes. But it’s necessary for all sorts of reasons, and while my ruthlessness may currently be limited to selecting no more than 6 frames from 36 exposures (or 3 from 12 on medium format) I probably need to be working that down even further. It’s way better than posting 3/4 of the shots on a roll, though, like I used to.

It has been said that you don’t really have a photograph until you have a print. I’m not sure I completely agree (how many people routinely made prints from slides, for example?) but I do think a carefully-made print is the ultimate expression of a photograph and offers something that you don’t get with a picture on a computer screen. It just feels more real when you hold a print. It feels like you’ve really made something. I don’t get that feeling with my digital photos at all and only a watered-down version of it with scanned film. Unless I make a print, of course. Then it feels real.

Not only that, but there’s the whole issue of seeing what the artist intended. I know what I see on my screen when I’m adjusting the curves on a scan and I know now that it’s close enough to what White House Custom Colour will produce in a print that I don’t sweat it. It should look as intended on a well-calibrated display. But how many viewers on the web are using a well-calibrated display? How many people are seeing muddy shadows where I see subtle tonal gradations? How many people are seeing excessively bright mid-tones and washed-out grays that were supposed to be deep black? How does the grain differ on their cheap LCD vs my old CRT? Online you have absolutely no way to know.

I just got back some 8×10 and 11×14 prints which I’ll be offering in an arts and crafts sale our church is running this Christmas and as good as those photographs looked on my computer screen, the prints blow the pixels out of the water, even though they’re merely digital lightjet reproductions of scans from the original film, the very same scans I viewed on my computer. I can’t begin to describe how much I’d like to see what these would look like done the traditional darkroom way.

Tonight I shall be matting and framing my prints and I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ll be even more imposing in their final, fully presented form. I do know already that I want to make good-quality medium sized prints of a lot more of my work (and maybe larger prints of the better examples) and for now, prints from scans of the negative will suffice.

Yes, online means I can be “seen” by many more people than otherwise would be the case, but they’re getting the cheap reproduction, packaged in a way that’s convenient for wide distribution, not the “real deal” at all; you need the print for that.

The RH Designs Analyzer Pro, by way of The Online Darkroom. A combination of enlarger timer and print exposure meter, on steroids. Just on the strength of reading about it, I know that I want one, and badly.

I don’t even have an enlarger yet. Or a darkroom.