Editing Your Portfolio . Andy Lee rephrased it to, “. At least twice a year. Minimum. I know many of you are wondering why I’m working on a print portfolio. What about web sites, PDFs, i. ![]() Resource for artists to display their work and network for creative jobs. Phones, thumb drives, laptops, etc, etc? Are printed portfolios still relevant? ![]() In my opinion they are. That opinion also is held by many in the editorial and advertising world. I know of two leading Ad agencies that won’t meet with you if you walk in with only an electronic portfolio. They want to see your book. The printed output of your work. ![]() ![]() Adobe Creative Cloud for education provides educational institutions with industry-leading creative tools and centralized software management and deployment. I’m currently in the process of updating and printing a new portfolio and I thought I would take a moment half day to talk about the process. Welcome to our free Flash Tutorial section. Our tutorials cover basics of Flash animation and Flash actionscripting. Learn cool Flash effects and basic Flash concepts! Learn software, creative, and business skills to achieve your personal and professional goals. Join today to get access to thousands of courses. Online video resource for expert instruction and inspiration about Adobe products. Discover how PADI, the world’s leading scuba diver training organization, delivers interactive training materials across tablet devices using Adobe Digital. ![]() Anything can look good on an i. Pad. Can it print? Can it run larger? The devil, and the jobs, are in the details. Wedding photographers know this all too well. Do you want to deliver a disk of zeros and ones or would you rather deliver a beautifully printed album? What is going to live in plain sight? A thumb drive or a book? Which one will be cherished? Which one has lasting value? Which one makes you more excited to deliver? Which one is instant? That’s which one. A printed book is a thing to take pride in. There’s something tangible about it that holding an i. Pad doesn’t compare to. Note that I’m a big believer in electronic forms of showing your work. I walk into every meeting with a print book AND an i. Pad. The book is the best representation I have of the work I do. The i. Pad holds expanded galleries of work that support the book and hold other galleries of work that don’t find their way into the main book. Things like personal projects, travel photography, video, etc. Eventually I want to have a series of print books that show a range of the work I do. I’ve lived as a photographer for some time without a book. I wanted a book but didn’t have the time, money, discipline, etc to get it done. Going from having no book to having a book you’re ready to show is a pretty large mountain to climb. Choosing the physical book and making the prints are the easier parts. It’s editing the book that will make you cry and leave you feeling completely inadequate as a photographer. You’ll pray for your strengths while constantly focusing on your weakness through the process but I can’t stress enough how invaluable the process is. For me it’s more about the process of building a book than actually having a physical book to show. Let’s talk through the physical process. The full discussion can be found after the jump. Label it “Master Portfolio” or something like that. Inside of that folder will be a series of folders. Something like “Possibles” “Edit for print” “Print Finals” “Resize for i. Pad” “Resize for web” “Etc”. You’re going to start off with at least 1,0. Dealing with that many files and trying to get them down to the top 2 or 3% is going to require getting organized with the big edit. My BIG edit folder has around 1,7. You may also want to consider making genre specific folders to keep additional copies of your images in. I have folders like “guys” “girls” “hiphop” “rock” “editorial” “personal” “project X” “project Y”, etc. This helps you later organize web galleries and things like that if you feel the need to do so. Everything from your print book to your web galleries are going to live in this master folder. Make sure you are making regular back ups of this folder. You may even want to consider an online service like Photoshelter to keep these RAW files online in case of a drive disaster. This folder will, after all, be holding your best work so you want to hold on to it. The BIG Edit : : Brew 1. Grab the RAW untouched files where possible. Don’t get the processed JPGs. Get the originals whenever you can. You may think your post production skills three years ago were awesome but as you put your work together today you may not like those 1. Trust me on this. Don’t think “is this going to be in my portfolio?” while you do this first step. You’re just looking for photos you like. Like you really like them. Maybe you shot five consecutive frames of someone laughing and you like all five. Copy all five of them to a BIG edit folder. Notice I said “copy” your photos into the BIG edit folder. Don’t move them out of their home in the job folder where they lived. Make a copy. You want ONE folder holding all of the images. You can then copy specific images into genre folders if you want but the main folder holds all of them. Go through your edits and any other RAW files you may have from the job that you did not deliver to the client. It’s always amazing to go back into a shoot and find a gem of a shot that didn’t make the edit when you first shot and delivered that job. You not only grow as a photographer but you grow as a photo editor in your life. A shot you may have passed up three years ago suddenly jumps out at you now. That is why I never delete my unpicked files. I always keep them. I go through these old folders a few times a year. You may spend a few days going through this process. Try to be a bit disciplined and pull a handful of your favorite images into this BIG edit folder after every job. Let this folder live on your main drive all the time. Constantly be adding stuff to it as you are shooting. The first time you do this will take awhile though. Be very loose with your edit. If you like an image, throw it in the BIG edit folder. If you think an image might just be a good texture for a promo or something, throw it in this folder. Anything that has anything to do with your marketing and branding can dump in this folder. Go with your gut on these decisions. You can’t have too many in there. Well, yes you can, but if you’re hovering around 1,0. You’ll go digging for the jewels in there later. Pretty soon you’ll be going blind looking at a large sampling of your work. As you can see in the screen capture above, I use Photo Mechanic through this entire process. It’s the fastest way I’ve found to go through a large amount of work. It makes quick work of the culling process as you begin to sort through the work. Take a day off : : Now that you’ve collected a large amount of work, take a day off. Separate yourself from it all. Get away from it for a day or two. Cleanse the palate so to speak. Hunker down. This begins the painful process. It’s painful to not only choose but if you are a true creative this is the part where your self doubt, anxiety, and loathing start to show up. You come back to your BIG edit and it all sucks. The images that you want to shoot are not in this folder. They are still out in the world waiting for you to capture them. As you start to go through 1,0. You want to trash them all and just go shoot a new book. Well sorry Charlie, you can’t do that. You can’t go shoot a new book. Those elusive images are just that. You have to harden yourself during this process and realize that you are building a body of work with what you have to work with. If you ever say “I’ll just do this when my work is ready” then you will never do it. That kept me from this process for a long time. Kick the demons out of your head and get to work. Pull the images up one by one in full screen mode and start numbering or tagging or labeling them somehow. I typically use a numbered system. Do whatever you want, just start marking or flagging them with a key stroke command so that you can later sort your edits. I typically do the first edit with a 3 star label. Then I go through that edit and hit images with a 4 star label. Then I go through that with a 5 star label. You can do yellow, blue, green, etc. Just find something that works for you and do that. Just keep in mind you want varying levels of ratings so that you can go through this process in waves so to speak. You’re going to cull that 1,0. Then that needs to get down to 2. Then that needs to get down to 1. Remember that your final portfolio is going to have a set of 2. You’re starting with 1,0. The 1,0. 00 are all images you have responded positively to but the vast amount of these have to get cut and won’t see the light of day again for a long time, if ever. The 1. 00 : : Culling your BIG edit folder down to 1. It will take some time but it’s pretty easy to do. Maybe you end up with 7. Maybe it’s 2. 00. Just get it to somewhere around 1. It’s time to get them off the computer and make small work prints of this smaller edit. We have an inexpensive Samsung color laser printer that we use for this process. From Photo Mechanic I print all of these images four up on a letter sized page. That’s four images to a page. I then cut these pages in quarters. Once you have your small work prints done start laying them out on tables. Having a dedicated area for this will help. Clear off a few folding tables in your garage, basement, studio, etc and lay them all out. By the time you have culled your 1,0. You have a wide angle view of your work. It’s time to start focusing on the details now. Clear a wall and grab some tape. Two by Two : : Start picking photos in pairs. That’s the easiest way to get the process started. You’re looking for images that work well when shown together. Your web galleries may show images one at a time but a print book typically will have spreads of photos together. Start finding these pairs and tape them to the wall. Don’t worry about the pacing of the whole book just yet. Just start getting pairs on the wall. For the last three books I’ve edited I started the process with a set number of images I was trying to hit. Something like, “No more than 3. For the edit we are putting together now I’m not thinking that way. I’m just thinking about a solid book that isn’t too big. I want to see what naturally starts appearing on the wall. I’ll deal with 2. Once you start the process the pace picks up. It’s slow at first and then finds a natural pace. It’s sort of like playing the memory game where you are trying to find matching cards. This is a good time to show two different images from one shoot. Maybe you want to show what you can do in studio AND on location with one client. Pairing two images like this can be done nicely. Once you get a dozen or two pairs on the wall start to step back from it. Look at it as an entire body of work now.
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November 2017
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