Happy Sunday, fellow GUILD-ers! This week you can find me over on the @fotovisura IG account where I'll be posting outtakes from stories I've shot over the last few years. Most of these photographs have never seen the light of day and have been collecting digital dust in my hard drives. I'm hoping this takeover can begin a conversation about the trials and tribulations of photo editing. The editing process can difficult for many photographers, especially the more sentimental or emotional bunch like myself. I can't tell you how many times I've stubbornly included an image into a portfolio edit merely because I remembered the exact moment and memory attached to its capture.
"Why are there so many hands in your edit?!," countless editors have said to me. "Because I think hands are beautiful and expressive," I retort.
It's amazing how one image can evolve from being crucial, redundant or purely unnecessary within a story sequence. I think what many people fail to realize is that effective visual story telling doesn't end at the magic that draws you to pull the trigger on your camera shutter. The magic transpires during the countless hours of hair pulling and eye-straining over your laptop. It's the artful selection process; the dutiful curating that will make a story sing. It seems to be in the editing that we editors, curators, artists, photographers, viewers seem to misunderstand each other. In the spirit of FotoVisura's new GUILD platform, which seeks to bring transparency and community to the photo industry, I encourage you to join in on the conversation that I will be having with myself this week. Whether you're a photographer or just an average @instagram junkie, I'd love for us all to decide whether there is in fact a magic formula to editing.
If you are not an Instagram junkie however, you can also hop on over to @twitter for the next few days where I'll be interviewed by @fotovisura about life and that daily freelance photo grind we all love so much. That was a mouthful. Cheers!
-CG
