These days almost everyone carries a quality camera in their pocket thanks to smart phones. People take more pictures than ever before. It doesn’t cost you anything to take a snap and a huge amount of storage can be acquired for a paltry sum. What becomes of all these photos though? After an initial share to social media, they tend to accumulate in a digital landfill of forgotten images.
When I was growing up, digital photography didn’t exist. Every photo we cared about was printed. The best photos got stuck in photo albums and it was fun to revisit them every once in a while. Having something tangible and tactile to hold in your hands while looking at a photo is something that many people have forgotten about or never experienced.
The number of photos we used to have in the pre-digital days was a lot less than we’re used to contending with now. As I considered how to manage my own hoard of digital images, it occurred to me that printing could be an effective way to help cull and curate the photos that are truly meaningful. We effectively have unlimited input with digital photography. Printing is a way of placing a limit on output. Having an end goal with certain limitations helps to guide an entire process of approaching our photos with a curator mindset.
I’ve developed a workflow that helps me think about my photography with the mind of a curator every step of the way, from capturing the images to printing. In a nutshell, my process involves:
- Capturing images
- Consider the subject
- Set limitations
- Culling in camera
- A multiple pass image culling process
- Initial culling through an intermediary program
- Additional culling pass in main editing program
- Final culling pass of edited images
- Creating a short, carefully curated book
- Laying out a story or a collection of images for print
- Printing an inexpensive book or magazine
- Sharing your work – no social media required
Let’s get started!
Step 1 – Capturing Images
The curator mindset begins when you pick up your camera. It’s easy to start snapping away and fill up a memory card. What I suggest is being a bit more mindful and maybe setting some limits. Here are some things to consider when you venture out to take pictures.
Consider your subject
This may seem obvious, depending on the situation. Before you raise the camera to your eye, consider the subject of the photo. Why are you photographing this person or thing? What are you trying to say about the subject in your photo and how best can you accomplish that? Having a good idea of what you are looking for will help you get there in less frames. Be intentional with each shot.
Set limitations
Something that really helps me is to think in terms of an artificial limitation. I may tell myself that I’ve got a roll or two of film and that’s it – so I stop shooting when I hit whatever that limit happens to be. For example, when photographing a band on stage, I might treat it like I have a 36 exposure roll of film. When I hit 36 shots, I put the camera away. Another limitation might be time based, such no more than 10 minutes with a single subject. Think quality over quantity.
Culling in camera
This may not be comfortable for some people, but it’s worth considering. If you have time to review images on your camera before you get back home, you could do some preliminary culling of photos. I often do this out in the field if I’m somewhere that I can sit and go through my memory card on my camera LCD screen. I’ll delete images that are obvious rejects so that there are less images to consider back at home.
If you’re not comfortable deleting images in your camera, see if you have a feature that lets you rate images. On some cameras you can assign a rating that a software application on your computer can read. This rating can be used as a guide when selecting images for import.
Step 2 – Image import and culling
I find it useful to make my image culling a multiple step process, leading up to a final curation of images from a shoot. The extra steps keep my primary photo library cleaner, as well as giving me more opportunities to scrutinize things with that curator mindset.
Initial ingest
I like to use separate processes for getting images off of my camera’s memory card and importing them into my main photo library. This ensures that only the images that I think have value are ever copied to my system and ultimately to the cloud service I use. Clutter is kept out of my library and less space and bandwidth is required once I do import into my main library.
For the first step, I can recommend a couple of options. For most people who work off of a Windows or Mac computer, I recommend using Photomechanic. It’s a paid app and it’s worth every penny. This app is lightning fast at whipping through images on your memory card so you can quickly tag the ones you want to import to your system hard drive. You can also add metadata to the images while you’re making your selection. I discovered this app when I was doing high volume sports photography and found it to be excellent at what it does.
Another option, if you have an iPad or Mac, is to use Apple Photos for the initial import. For smaller numbers of images (a “roll or two of film”), this works well. You can easily go through images and view them at full screen size on a tablet, which is more than enough to judge images. Make your picks and import into Photos. You’ll take those imports into your main library