- Location
- Seattle
- Name
- Andrew
I've been culling my photos lately, actually have made a couple passes through some of the recent/standout stuff in the past half-year. Partly digging through work that's three or four years old to distill it to the interesting moments, pick the best out of the many multiple shots of the same thing, etc. Yes, I'm lazy and a lot of those sit there for years before getting attention.
Today I also went through Flickr again, which sort of holds my "good, interesting" photos (more by nature of its being public than any strict forethought or planning), and while I'd done so a few months back and deleted a fair amount, I was able to easily delete about 50 today (I usually keep to around the 500-600 mark on Flickr). So 10% of my photos seemed easily culled, even though many had been there for several years or even longer.
Do you find yourself crossing sort of thresholds regarding how you feel about your work? I could surmise that today was just a different, more discerning "mood" than previously, but I think it's more than that. A lot of the photos which got the axe on my public Flickr were discernable as instances where I was trying to emulate something. Seems like a form of indoctrination of what it considered "good" where, once I build enough distance from that particular outside influence, the photos I came up with are recognizably not that good, because I had an imperfect understanding of what I was reaching for, plus it wasn't really coming from a deeper place in myself anyway - it was someone else's deeper place maybe, but imperfectly comprehended.
Not sure whether I'm actually any closer to figuring out what I want to "say" photographically, but sometimes it feels like a step forward is made.
Today I also went through Flickr again, which sort of holds my "good, interesting" photos (more by nature of its being public than any strict forethought or planning), and while I'd done so a few months back and deleted a fair amount, I was able to easily delete about 50 today (I usually keep to around the 500-600 mark on Flickr). So 10% of my photos seemed easily culled, even though many had been there for several years or even longer.
Do you find yourself crossing sort of thresholds regarding how you feel about your work? I could surmise that today was just a different, more discerning "mood" than previously, but I think it's more than that. A lot of the photos which got the axe on my public Flickr were discernable as instances where I was trying to emulate something. Seems like a form of indoctrination of what it considered "good" where, once I build enough distance from that particular outside influence, the photos I came up with are recognizably not that good, because I had an imperfect understanding of what I was reaching for, plus it wasn't really coming from a deeper place in myself anyway - it was someone else's deeper place maybe, but imperfectly comprehended.
Not sure whether I'm actually any closer to figuring out what I want to "say" photographically, but sometimes it feels like a step forward is made.