Advices on how to present a photo album PART 1 :: PYKtures Tricks

With digital photography becoming a common thing today, most digital photographers will tend to overshoot. Although such practices help getting the best shots (especially in situations where there’s a risk of camera shake), they also tend to create visual pollution due to the repetition it creates and confusion due to the variety of angles of the subject captured by the photographer.

This article is not the definitive way of doing things. It rather helps putting a good quantity of great shots in an album rather than spam our eyes to death and cause us to skip to the end.

You are the creator. You create for your own self-enjoyment.


Avoiding the Contact Sheet Syndrome

A contact sheet is basically a layout of all the shots you took for you to decide on which one to “blow up” (when you are shooting film and darkrooming) or in this case, process out of the many shots you took. In the darkroom, I’d spend at least an hour per print so when I choose carefully what shot to present. In the digital darkroom, it is important to apply the same mindset when looking at your pictures. Else, you’ll be presenting a contact sheet.

“Star”ing your favorite shots through screening
When facing a giant library of pictures, I go through then quickly by giving each of them a star just like I click the “like” button on facebook.

These are the questions that go through my head when I give the first star to my pictures:

• - Does that picture help to advance the album?
• - Do I like this picture enough to not get bored of it?
• - When I go back to this picture a year later, will I still like it?
• - Etc…

I then get rid of the pictures with no star and proceed to the addition of another star to the pictures I gave one star to and repeat the process until I get a reasonable amount.

Knowing the reasonable amount
You know when you have a reasonable amount when

1. Each shot takes the last shot’s perspective and really adds a new and interesting point of view.
2. Each shot is the definitive shot of the ideas you have in your head.

You failed to select the best shots when you have more than 2 shots of the same thing with similar point of view (horizontal version, vertical version etc…) that are really too close to each other. If this happens, either you select the best out of the repetitions or you find a reason to keep them aside from “I want to give them a variety of angles for them to choose which one is best” because your album will become a contact sheet rather than an album.

So there you have it: a way to keep your albums to the point and to make you remember the best views you could make.

Next part will cover the post processing workflow.