Digital Contact Sheets - Episode 1: Working The Scene for Better Photographs

(5-10 Minute Read)

Hey Guys! In today’s post I wanted to try something different, I wanted to show you how it was for me to go out and shoot and then revised and critique my own work in order to select the images I would end up using. This is a new segment I guess for critiquing my work and hopefully, in the future your work (If you are brave enough to send it to be critiqued). Often times a lot of us photographers, choose images that don’t really work and keep the ones that do hidden from the public. Other times photographers just show everything as their “Best work” and that is also a problem, that I hope to prevent with this new segment.

The purpose of this segment is to learn from the mistakes made and to show that it doesn’t matter how many images you take or how good of a photographer you are, there will always be good images and bad images. Your job now is to figure out:

• How to be critical about your own work.
  
• How to know which images to show and which to throw away.
  
• What are you doing wrong and how can it be improved. 
  

I chose the Contact Sheet theme because when I started shooting film and making contact sheets I started being more critical about my work and being way more detail oriented which is great because it makes you a more detail sensitive photographer when going out shooting. Having a printed contact sheet of ones work its a great way to absorb all images as a whole instead of going one by one and figuring out which one works best. Plus its really hipster looking and I like that. Anyhow, here is my first Digital Contact Sheet

Right off the bat I know there are some images I really don’t like and I definitely won’t ever use. For example the lady reading

I don’t like the way I composed it, its kind feels awkward to just look at it. Is not close enough to get any emotion or action and the negative space above her might be to overwhelming. But shes reading, there is something happening isn’t it? Well yeah but, what is she reading? What does it say about her? It was a good piece of information I missed and made me lost my story completely for it. I tried to get another image but she then noticed I was taking pictures so I moved on to shoot other stuff. 

This one didn’t had a problem In my opinion, but since I saw I could get a more interesting composition I moved my framed and took the other which I liked better. So basically what I wanted to say with this is that even if you think you got the shot, work the scene a bit more and you might find something better. 

Same with the dog’s picture I took two frames the second one the dog looked at the camera which makes some sort of connection. 

This Family was fun to shoot, I asked them for one picture and ended up taking a bunch of them, even the little boys got out of the water for a picture. How I worked the scene here was a bit different, since I was dealing with a complete stranger I had to get over the process of getting comfortable with the camera and as you can see the little girl was really shy so I had to talk my way through it being playful with her, took a couple of frames and got one I really liked of the father hugging her and moved on to shoot the other children which was pretty easy and fluid. 

The kids were the best, the just wanted pictures and were really happy for it and it reflected on the final images. The only problem here was not even that big of a big problem, it was just that they were moving a lot, but I mean they’re kids so its nothing out of the ordinary. In the end I had a couple of good portraits and went home happy.

What happens then? After selecting the images I liked the best, I usually go through the images again and select the ones I REALLY like and that’s what I show. Remember that in the end, is your work and if you enjoy your photographs and believe they should be shown, do it. Your work speaks more to you than to any other person, it should reflect who you are and how you see the world and in the end there is no wrong or right way to go.

So this are my final images, hope you enjoy them.

That is it for today’s post, hope you’ve learn something from it. This will be a new segment in the blog, so don’t worry if I couldn’t answer all your questions, but if you want feel free to post your questions in the comment section below and don’t forget to share and subscribe to the mailing list.