2•Thoughts About My Portfolio
My first post tells a little about me and my “initiation story” of how I got into photography. It’s a fairly quick read and sets up this post.
My first attempts at the general genre of ‘nature photography’ started from my earliest shooting in 2007 with a pocket camera. I didn’t take photography seriously so I didn’t have a proper filing and editing system. Result: I don’t think I have any from that year, at least not in raw file format.
I bought my first DSLR camera in 2008 and with it I began to use a serious editing and storage application. In the early years of 2008/09/10 I don’t have many images I considered “keepers” let alone much I would deem worthy of being diplayed, partially because in the beginning I wasn’t spending much time shooting, but more so because despite finally getting that well-known filing and editing application, over those three early years as I was climbing the learning curve and playing with files, making backups (or failing to), I had some disc corruption issues and lost a lot of images — some quite good. There were some painful lessons learned: Always have backups of raw image files, on more than one backup medium and stored in more than one location, including one “off-sight.”
Here is what my catalog is holding as of the day I am writing this:
These numbers represent raw files saved after culling through a shooting average of at least 10,000 taken per year (2020 not yet fully culled). On days I shoot, I usually take 50–200 images.
Of that total number, I would probably:
• keep about a third after the first cull, whittled down from there as I feel less attached and more critical over time, or as better stuff is captured later;
• never display on the web more than maybe 1%;
• call substantially less than 0.1% “best works,” suitable for entry in competitions or offered for sale as finished photo products such as prints or other wall hangings.
If you want to be taken seriously as a serious photographer, the pantheon of photo gods will give you their “best practice” advise that you display only your best images (cue speedlight flashes and thunder). Always. I have to respectfully disagree.
They may be gods of sorts, but I, being of lesser mere-mortal status, have always kept selected less-successful images — quite a lot of them — for a few reasons:
• Some might be part of series documenting something of interest to me, helping me to remember and understand a subject about which I was not very knowledgeable. My photography is, first and foremost, for me.
• Another would be due to the metadata embedded in the file (the technical information the camera records about each image) that is useful in comparing the details of various shots when evaluating and understanding what made some more successful and others less so.
• Photographers can be like any other pack-rat type who just can’t bring themselves to get rid of anything. I admit to a little of that. Sometimes images that are technically or artistically lacking are kept because they captured something I might not ever get the chance to capture again…sort of like those blurry Nessie or Bigfoot shots. And there is a feeling-attached-to-your-work thing. They are your babies. That sense seems to fade only as time becomes distance, diluting the emotional attachment and (hopefully) imbuing a healthy, ever-maturing, unemotional (self) critical eye.
That all said, I would like to always display only my very best shots, but sometimes it is more important to show images that document a unique situation regardless of the quality. I do a lot of serial and sequence shooting so rather than have a blank spot in a progression of images, I might include a clunker because I think showing continuity of the series is more important than image quality.
I will add that sometimes when I am in the heat of shooting, stalking my intended subject, that only later when I’m culling through the day’s files, full-screen in editing software, do I see something in the background or at the edge of the frame I didn’t see when I was framing the shot (a reason not to do any shot culling in-camera based on what you see on the little camera screen). Those mistakes often inspire a different approach to the next shooting session. A few examples will likely pop up in the course of events here.
