I started a sort of serial of pictures of a roadtrip. All shot during one day in seven hours going from Cardiff to Port Talbot and back. The result is called Welsh Surfaces and was edited in about an hour. The boring well-composed (maybe classically composed should be better) colour snapshot style of it is not at all representative of how I shoot, but more of a joke, I guess.
I like shooting in parties. Birthdays, happy things. Somehow they lend themselves for double readings and anarchic compositions of people. I guess you have to be a bit cheeky when you look at things, but well, it's much more fun than do straightforward pictures of things.
My friends are sometimes down because of editing their images, essays, sequences, projects, collections, sets, whatever you might want to call them. I think there's a misconception that editing your work is the end of the road, that last thing you do before you call it a day. Probably I saw editing like that a while ago... when you go through your images and say, "man, this isn't good enough", "oh, I have three good images of X, but nothing else to interleave", "I have eight shots of Y, but only one goes in, which one?", "stupid, in this kind of pictures all the characters are girls", etc. Suddenly nothing keeps the pace, the thing falls apart, it turns tedious, or too strong or too soft or too fast or just doesn't work... and then you want to find a nice tree and kick the bucket.
I mean, it's hard to come up with an idea clear enough of something to shoot, and go and tick all the 'compositions', 'locations' and 'topics' boxes. Plus your idea might have been immensely unsatisfactory for yourself and you didn't realize it. Nowadays I find the first edit of anything that I'm shooting a very creative process... it's the first time that I see what I am shooting and how I want to follow it. Yeah, follow it, because it's not the end, it's more, I'd say that something is not a project in my head till I have edited at least once. Once I am done, instead of seeing all the things that the edit is lacking and go to find a very tall tree, I think about how I am going to shoot them. Suddenly, from the images new branches and paths emerge. You can easily plan ahead what images to drop completely ('lets get rid of all the portraits', e.g.) and what to follow. Where there are gaps on the edit that need a certain pace, whether you have tried a certain shot too many times without noticing it, whether you have biased yourself to give a certain message to the whole when actually, under the surface, something more quiet but stronger resides. So if you are thinking about your first (painful) edit... cheer up! It's still only the beginning!
Anyhow, if I come up as too optimistic, well, give a go at Always Look at the Bright Side of Life.
Back in the day, a few months ago, we started a thread in HCSP called please don't waste our time. It was mostly to show to the members of the group what kind of photographs we don't want to see submitted once and again to the group. I thought that we had not used this thead a lot, but today I realized that it has 263 comments in it. I understand that having more than 21k members that potentially can submit stuff to the group means that we have to go through lots of crap, but most of it is not amazingly shocking enough for us to go on to this thread (oh, I had to correct a typo there that read 'shit thread') and post the image.
Some of it is so bad that it turns... well, maybe not good, but worth a look at. Take this one, for example:
This is going to be a confusing post. Stills from The Shining, general chitchat about editing photoessays and a review of The Orphanage. Sorry about that.
I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...
