To cull your photos in photography is the process of sorting out the keepers from the ones that didnât meet your visual mark. Itâs the process of refining your initial vision for a shoot which to me is exciting because you get to relive experiences that made you giddy as you were capturing them.
When weâre hired for a job, itâs not just solely for our technical ability to capture something artistic but also for our ability to edit. Far too often itâs overwhelming in seeing photographers share an enormous amount of photos from a shoot. Perhaps more photos that we as audience are able to digest.
Like everything else in life, there has to be a nice balance. Itâs difficult to imagine a photographer that doesnât get excited about an epic travel adventure or a studio shoot thatâs allowed them to flex their creative vision. Itâs normal for us to want to show our work but how you present the photos from a shoot and the diversity of them is just as important. We donât need to see 8 photographs of a subject that when placed alongside each other you canât even tell them apart. More is not always better, especially in these scenarios.
When I edit photos from a shoot, thereâs a tons of images I would love to publish on the website but when I look at feature articles within publications I admire such as Menâs Health, Self Magazine or even Travel & Leisure, youâll never see everything completely laid out. By the time you see those photos you love in a magazine, a meticulous process of selecting the best ones has already happened since thereâs still text to consider.
What leads photographers to overshare? It could be that weâre not too confident yet in determining what we feel our best work is yet so to compensate we end up sharing everything and when you do that youâre ultimately leaving it up to the audience to decide for you.
I use to be guilty of this myself. When I overshoot someone, itâs merely to secure options to work with while I ultimately select the best ones later and not because my intention is to show you everything.
More is not always better. Instead, try to aim for a more concise tightly edited body of work. I know a lot of times we want to believe each and every frame we take is profound in its own way but that wonât always be the case. In fact, I always like to joke around that if at any time any of my work looks âgoodâ itâs because I havenât shown you âall the bad stuff Iâve photographed.â