the editing process

i realized something tonight…

i was at a little party in a friend’s dorm room, and i decided it might the a good time to whip out the good old camera and take at least a *few* pictures of the people to capture the memory of frosh week. when i brought a four-thousand dollar camera into a room full of people partying, i obviously attracted some attention (especially when i started to use flash). a few people started asking questions like are you studying photography? how much did you spend on that thing? etc. anyway, i decided to give the camera to a few of my friends have give them a chance to take some pictures from their own perspective, which was also a good thing for me because it meant i could actually be in a few shots and enjoy the party rather than looking through a viewfinder all night. this idea proved very successful because it shows (not only the perspectives of different people in the same situation) but it also reveals subjects that would be very difficult for me to capture (for example a few girls acted/posed/behaved differently when another girl took their picture as opposed me taking it).

i was just sitting here in my dorm (at 4 am) in front of my computer going through the photos i and everyone else had taken. i did the routine editing process, which is going through the photos and tagging my favorites/deleting really bad ones. it was then that it really hit me: taking the photo is truly only part of the creative process in photography. the other significant part is editing them (and by editing i don’t mean going and changing light/contrast/colour/etc on photoshop – though that’s an important part too – but just picking the one’s I like. i say this because as i began to pick the photos to post on flickr, i stuck to picking the ones that generally conform to my idea of what photography should be. in many cases I skipped over the ones that others had taken and stuck to my own photos anyway…

this made me realize that no matter how creative a photographer’s perspective is, those new, fresh perspectives will never be seen if they don’t pass the photographer’s editing workflow… so i’m going to try to be more open to photos when editing them after a shoot, rather than judging them without a closer look.

btw you can see the photos on my flickr photo stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/payamrajabi/