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"Your picker is broken," she said to me.
I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly. "My WHAT is broken?!"
"Your picker! You haven't exactly been making great choices."
"Oh," I said. "My PICKer...."
It was an amusing end to what was shaping up to be a very awkward conversation.
I had just met Cynthia, and it was one of those talks you have about your past and the people you've chosen to be with, and it was clear from the things I was telling her that my own choices of partners had not been particularly good. My criteria hadn't exactly been well considered in the past. She decided my, um, picker needed some recalibration. She wasn't wrong.
Photographers don't always make the best choices, either. That's one reason we struggle with the edit, and at the risk of overstating my case, I want to help you fix your picker.
I made my current course, Beyond The Shutter, to help photographers like you make more sense of your choices during the edit, to be better organized, to think more clearly about your selections, and to begin with the end in mind: the final photograph and how it finds its way into the world.
I see the process of making photographs as a bit of a circle. Or it can be. You put the camera to your eye and make decisions about all kinds of things, like composition and settings. Then you choose the best frame of many to refine and develop, and then—ideally—you share those photographs. Maybe you print them, perhaps you make a slideshow or put them online. So far, there's no circle—just a straight line.
It's when you begin to consider the end result first that you can build a better image to begin with.
When we know we might be making large prints, we make different choices about the scale of the image itself. What plays well on Instagram will play differently in larger media and vice versa. When we know we're making a book, we might pay more attention to sequences. When we know we're putting the image on the front of a magazine, that also involves different choices. It's why I've been talking about vision over and over again for so many years, and while we don't always know where our photographs will end up, there's a good bet that many of the photographers you know (not you, but the other ones) aren't giving it much thought at all. Not when they shoot, not when they develop, and definitely not when they edit or choose their final images.
“Exceptional! This is a game-changer for photographers like me. 3 weeks ago, I had over 10,000 images sitting on my external hard drive after a trip to Africa; I was overwhelmed and frustrated. After Beyond the Shutter, I had ALL my images quickly and easily organized and edited, I made my first monograph and am already on my way to finishing that website I told myself I would make years ago. This class is well worth the time and money! I just wish it had been around 10 years ago!”
- Heather Mattera, Minnesota
I want to help you think differently about all of this, and that's what Beyond The Shutter is for. Yes, it's about editing and putting your work into the world, but it's also about how those choices help you make stronger photographs to begin with. And it's also about enjoying your craft and your photographs more and making the most of your time and focus.
If I can save you from that awkward moment when someone is looking at your photographs tells you. or thinks to themselves that your picker is broken, then I want to do that, too.
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