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Image editing |
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Friday, 07 January 2005 |
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Editing for the web is not an easy task for a start. It seems that there are so many images on the web that you are bound to feel that if you want to be taken seriously as an image maker, you have to produce a large body of work, galleries with hundreds of images, but I don't think that it's wise. Remember uncle Robert's slide show from his last trip to France where he took 22 rolls of film and felt inclined to show every last frame ? "just three caroussels, we should be able to go through it tonight..."
Point is, editing for the web is the same as editing for any other media. You need to keep a critical balance between the number of images shown and their quality. If you have hundreds of images to chose from, and show only the 20, or 10 best, then people will perceive a higher level of quality than if you shoe the whole lot, with the same 10 or 20 very good images lost in a sea of not-so-good ones...
The strategy I've taken for the Mamut Photo galleries is to show eight images from each photographer's work. It allows for enough images to present a general view of the artist's work, and yet not enough to be satiated, and then you click on to look at the photographer's website if you're interested... It's a different strategy than for my personnal website where I present around 60 images, and which will continue to grow. Here the idea is to give an overview of all my work, and to show groups of images, like my "squares" gallery.
In the process of creating the Mamut Photo's online galleries I've stumbled across an experience that I hadn't done before : editing other people's work. It's radically different from editing your own work, and somehow much easier, because there is no emotional stigmata associated with the images. You know when and where your own images were taken, and how you felt at the time, what happened on that day, etc, This means that your own images carry your emotional content in addition to their own, and changes the way you see them, wheras other people's images carry only their own emotional content.
In short, that's why most photographers don't like to do their own editing and gladly let other people do it for them ! |
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