Photo Editing
Let me just say, photo editing is hard. A measure of just how hard it really is begins with the requirement that any time you speak of photo editing, you have to qualify what it is you are talking about. Is it post processing or is it choosing photos? This blog is about choosing photos. I have officially been schooled. Photo editing is always about choosing photos.
My understanding of just how hard photo editing is began when I started entering gallery competitions in Nashville. A gallery competition is announced. Usually, but not always, there is a theme. You get to enter 5 photographs. Good luck.
My little granddaughter’s pick was accepted for the 2022 Scarritt Bennett competition of photos taken during the pandemic.
In the first competition, I had two images selected. We will attribute that to beginner’s luck. In the second competition, I got one image selected, but it was, as we say idiomatically, by the skin of my teeth. When the third competition came around, I decided I needed to have some kind of methodology for choosing the images I submitted for consideration. I asked Mr. Google to weigh in with some advising articles, but either there are none or I did a poor job in the asking. I had read that getting outside opinion can really help when you are editing a photo book, so I thought I would give that a try. I enlisted the only candidates I could think of to help me choose, my poor family. It turns out that is too much to ask. Well, I will qualify that. If you have a young child in your life, show them the set of pictures under consideration and ask them which ones they like. They will be honest and perhaps right on.
This submission was selected for the 2021 Gordon Jewish Community Center gallery exhibition that had no theme. This has a very strong graphic element. I suspect that I am fortunate that the judge envisioned it could be the lead-in photo for the exhibit.
One other thing that I did was to look at the judge’s personal work. If it is an annual competition, look at the previous year’s winners. In a sense, I used information about earlier competitions to choose the picture below to submit on my first gallery competition. The little story of that is in the caption. Since it can’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the judge or the competition, I would recommend that any photographer who posts in the Facebook Group, Street Photography Challenge, should really look carefully at the examples. It might steer you away from submitting images that do not meet the judge’s concept for the challenge.
This submission was accepted for the 2021 exhibition of photography of southern life at the Hotel Preston. I generally would probably not submit this photo to a competition, but I had heard that sometimes edgy photos were accepted in this venue. The judge told me that she initially passed over it, but kept coming back and seeing more. It is rather quintessential Nashville southern.
All of this is a long introduction to a virtual class I recently took that addressed the question of how to choose entries for competitions. It was given by Juan Reyes, who organizes the annual Miami Street Photography Festival (MSPF). Juan is a fantastic street photographer, so he has to edit his own work. But he also oversees an annual gallery competition that is part of the MSPF. I was very interested in his thoughts, which turned out to be a presentation of a sophisticated rating model for street photography photos.
I am going to give you a barebones sketch of this model. This is not my intellectual property and it is also not published publicly, so I am very limited in how much I can disclose. If you find are interested in the concept, I strongly suggest you contact Juan to find out the class schedules in the future. You can reach him on Instagram at @jjreyes_t.
Juan uses two criteria to classify street photos. The first is the level of the photo and the second is the type of the photo. Before the class, he sent each participant a file that described how he organized the various levels. Some concepts are just hard to understand. This is one of them for me, right along with the difference between chroma and saturation and figuring out what a punctum is. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to read that file and look at the pictures he chose as examples.
This submission was also accepted for the 2021 exhibition of photography of southern life at the Hotel Preston.
Juan describes five levels that are determined by two components. The first component is its emotional interest to the viewer. The low end of emotional interest, which accounts for about 80% of all street photography, is reflected by the viewer’s response, “Oh, that is nice.” Visual elements, like juxtaposition can create more of an emotional response. Okay, that is the easy component. The second component is what Juan describes as cognitive friction. The degree of cognitive friction is a measure of how hard the viewer’s brain has to work to understand the photo. That is a concept I am still trying to nail down.
There are three types of street photos. Gosh, I thought there were a lot more than that, but this is very particular delineation. I will only mention the first of the three, the “reporter” photo. In a reporter photo there is just not much going on except that a particular moment was captured. I personally have a whole lot of reporter photos.
I finished Juan’s Zoom presentation totally intrigued with the possibility of his rating model. But I also understood that to use this model was going to take some serious practice. In addition, that practice would have to be on photos that were not mine. How to do that was a bit of a challenge. My friend, Monica Lord, who had taken the class with me, agreed that each week we would classify the winners of the Classic Street Photography Challenge using that model. That gave us 12 images that had been identified out of hundreds of images submitted in competition. We would then talk on the phone to compare our ratings.
Another submission accepted for the Scarritt Bennett Competition for photos taken during the pandemic. I did not really appreciate how appropriate the fist bump was.
It was pretty hard to rate the first week. There are a lot of nuances, not just in the levels, but also in the types. It is easier to rate classic street photography than it is to rate abstract street photography or street portraits. Many times Monica and I had come to roughly the same rating, but sometimes we varied fairly wildly. That is as informative, if not more, than when we agreed. I do think that I am getting incrementally better at using the model. Today I was looking at posts for the Crossings challenge. I saw an extraordinary photo and thought, ah, Level 5, Type 3. I can hardly wait to see if it is recognized.
There are two questions now. (1) If I ever judge again, will I use this model? (2) Can this model help me choose images for submissions to competitions I am interested in?
Relative to judging, I cannot imagine getting to the point that I could classify hundreds of images quickly enough to make this a criterion. I am not sure that I would even want to, if I could. I think this is a tool that is better used to assist in making final choices. Some photos attract a viewer because they create a sense of amusement and entertainment. They are easy to like, but not necessarily to spend much time with. When I get down to the final set of contenders, I suspect this model would help me choose winning images that create a more complex experience for the viewer.
The final submission accepted for the Scarritt Bennett Competition for photos taken during the pandemic. All three of the photos accepted for this competition were very “clean” photos in the sense that there was absolutely no overlap of figures. I made that decision consciously.
I absolutely think this model can help me choose submissions for my own work, once I get used to using it. There is really no point in submitting photos to a competition that are a low level or low type. It is also shaping how I think about the kind of street photographer that I want to be. Maybe I can only be that kind of photographer every once in a while. But I am willing to hold out for those occasional photos.