Hey!
For those who may have read a recent post of mine talking about how I’ve finished shooting for a very long term project, well this is kind of a follow on to that. This is more so about editing the work down to a final selection… Not processing images.
So where do you begin?…. Believe me, this is a question I have asked myself soooo many times! My Home project has an archive of 10,000 plus images! A few years ago, I did start to go through the archive to try make selections but to say that attempt was poor is an understatement.
When I’ve had time in the evenings, I’ve been going though the archive, month by month. Each month I copied images into a new folder with “Potential” pictures…. Once I’ve gone through the month, I then dive in to the selected pictures for that month and edit down even further.
I’m thankful for one habit I have… And that is when I transfer the images from camera to laptop, I’m pretty brutal in what stays and what goes… I think this is just my nature of being critical of myself and my work, however this has saved a time in this process of editing down work… The utter crap is already gone and makes choices a little easier.
One thing I am struggling with though… Being a very personal project about my family, its tough to decide on pictures that I feel a strong emotional attachment too Vs another image that technically, compositionally is better… Something I need to figure out for sure.
Why this project?
This project was only ever intended to be seen by my family, and close friends that may be interested. It often plays on my mind that my main body of work will hold very little interest to the rest of the world.
I had a chat with a friend about this and he told me that I would be pleasantly surpirised by how many outsiders might take interest in the project.
My plan though for now is to complete the edit and produce a small run of books for my family… From there I need to decide what to do.
This body of work could easily just stay on the hard drive, but I need to do the work justice by printing it… What a shame it would be to dedicate all of these years shooting for it, and do nothing with it! That would be terrible.
This isn’t the first project I’ve had to edit, however it is by far the largest body of work I’ve had to edit… Challenge accepted!
Compared to other projects, this one will be printed so there is more to consider in terms of narrative, sequencing etc. Do I have it done year to year or do I scatter the work over the years to acheive a certain narrative?
All questions I need to figure out.. I will most likely reach out to other photographers who have published books and see what they recommend.
This was a bit of a ramble, but I imagine this will take up quite a bit of time and wanted to get it off my chest.
Thanks for reading!
Lewis