Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Photography

Life Is Happening
Life is happening right now. it is not something you hope will happen someday. Make the most of it, now. This includes your photography.
Now is all we have
The past is gone. The future is uncertain. The present time is what we have. Use it. Use it up. Wring it dry.
Time is a scarce and fleeting resource. We can’t slow it or bank it or save it. It passes, whether we want it to or not. It moves at the same rate for all of us. Use this very moment wisely. Once it is gone, it can never be reclaimed.
I don’t mean to be all Zen or depressing. But this is true and should be top of mind for all of us. Time is a resource we cannot control. All we can do is use it wisely.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
We don’t get a “do over”
We only have one life. I won’t argue reincarnation with you.
The choices we make on a day to day basis shape our future. When we decide not to do something, it is rare to get a second chance. How many opportunities do we let slip by to do something that would make us better?
Deciding to spend our time watching TV or playing games or hanging out on social media is wasting one of our most valuable treasures – our time. Solely my opinion, of course. Only you can decide what is the best use of your life.
Do days seem to slip away, disappear into a fog of sameness as we repeat the same actions every day? Why do that? That is the result of having no direction. Of letting external voices control our lives. Those voices do not have our best interests at heart.
It is commonly documented that when people are asked on their death bed what they regret, one of the most common regrets is that they did not take the chances they wanted to. For instance:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. – Old Colony Hospice
Fear caused them to miss out on the opportunities to lead a different life. This is what they regret at the end. It is so easy to do and it seems like the safe path. But who said everything should be safe or easy?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Don’t just live for the future
On the other hand, we sometimes see people who seem to live entirely for the future. They have a “plan”. Their current time and energy and money is being banked for what they plan to do “someday”.
This is another way of avoiding living your life in the present. It is great to have goals. Even great goals that will take years to achieve. But what about now? The goals should direct the trajectory of our lives and influence how we spend our time. But they should not shut us down. No matter how important our long term goals seem, we are still living our life right now.
Even if you’re an entrepreneur and are starting a business from the ground up, you still have a life to live Maybe you decide it is in your best interest right now to be working 100 hours a week and pouring all your money into this business. But at least have an exit plan. It’s got to be a temporary agreement with yourself. Know when to call it quits. Think about what it is doing to your life and health and your family. Some things are more important than making a big bundle of money.
There is a saying “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” One point of this is that we are not as in charge of our plans as we sometimes think. If we cannot control the future then it is foolish to pin our entire life on an uncertain outcome. Live for now, too, while we are working for that future.
I had a friend who worked and saved to retire early. He had great plans: extensive travel, learning languages, doing good works for charity, etc. A great list. A few months after he retired, he was dead. Didn’t see it coming.
Wouldn’t he have been better off doing those things when he had the chance rather than putting them off to “someday”?
Be in the moment
That probably seems very heavy and perhaps depressing. It shouldn’t be. It really resolves to a theme I come around to a lot – mindfulness.
Mindfulness simply means being present, in the moment, aware of things around you and what you are doing. It helps us to live our lives now rather than fretting about the past or worrying about the future. A mindful attitude encourages curiosity. It leads us to learn, to explore, to experiment.
As photographers, these are skills we should always be practicing. Are we really seeing what is around us? Are we open to the opportunities that are there? Do we see past our preconceptions? Are we able to see the things around us for what they are and what they can be? And are we willing to put it in action by going out and photographing it?
Compared to the life experiences I was talking about this may seem trivial. But it is all related. When we are mindful – when we can really be aware and in the moment – we will be more successful living in the present. Think of photography as training for living a more rewarding life.
So I believe it is at least a double reward. Being mindful in our photography will keep us more engaged. We will be more creative and we will likely be happier with our images. Isn’t that one of our purposes in photography? What is really more important than growing creatively and being pleased with our work?
But, too, as we practice mindfulness in our photography it helps discipline us to be mindful in our daily life. Just thinking and being aware and in the present helps us to consider what is important. It helps us to decide how to make better use of this moment.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Moderation
Am I suggesting that you should quit your job and go do whatever “fulfills” you at the moment? Of course not. Living your life means you have responsibilities. Some things are urgent, some are important, some are just necessary. Being mature is knowing the difference and deciding what to do when.
You have bills to pay. You have a career, a family, housing to provide, people have to eat. Your government wants you to pay taxes. Unfortunately, we do not just get to do anything we want. We will do what is necessary because we are responsible adults.
But we have a hundred moments a day to choose what to do. When we can choose to drift instead of doing something useful and constructive. To be on automatic and just do the easy things. Practicing mindfulness is a great help in being aware of what we are doing and deciding to choose better things to do.
Mindfulness in photography is practice that helps us lead a more mindful life overall. Photography can help shape our life. Who knew?
Life is happening all the time. We can’t call a time out. Let’s not let our life drift away without giving it the best we can do.
I don’t want to come across as “preachy” or judgmental or having all the answers. I am a fellow traveler, looking for my path. Perhaps I am further down my path than you are.
Please take this as encouragement to practice a more mindful life. Remind me, too. When we are mindful we can take joy in where we are and when we are.
January 22, 2025
Do You Take Pictures?
Do you take pictures? Well, of course. We all do. I suggest if we are serious about making art that may not be the best attitude.
Take pictures
It is estimated that about 2 Trillion pictures are taken a year. That is several hundred pictures for every person on the planet. Probably 99.999% of those are shot on cell phones. Nothing wrong with that. Cell phones have gotten amazing. But realistically, most of the shots taken are selfies or predictable tourist pictures. Again, nothing wrong with that. If the picture makes them happy, it is good.
Everybody takes pictures. Do you know anyone who has never taken one? I don’t.
But I am writing to an audience who admires photographic images and probably aspires to make much better ones themselves. What makes a picture good?
There are obvious qualifiers like being sharp, well lit, subject easy to see, things like that. Those are things that, if you do not do them, it probably will make the picture bad (unless you did it deliberately). But, as you have figured out from experience, eliminating the problems does not mean your pictures become “good”.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Taken by pictures
The concept of being taken by pictures is one I picked up from John Barclay. It resonates with me, because I have seen it working in my art.
What I have seen in my photo shoots is that sometimes something special happens. We no longer are looking for pictures. We have found a subject or place that captivates us. It releases some kind of creative energy within up. We are not just trying to take a picture, we are trying to capture the magic we are feeling. We have to shoot this. There is no choice not to.
It may be very easy or it may be hard. That is, the scene may present itself to us complete. We have found a treasure. We just have to compose it, set the camera, and take the picture. It is already perfect. Don’t mess it up;
Sometimes it teases us. We know there is something great hiding there, just out of reach. Maybe we have to walk around to look for the right angle. Perhaps it is zooming in on the right piece. Or waiting for the right light, Maybe it is a matter of thinking about it to figure out what is calling to us. Whatever it is, we usually know it when we see it. The inner voice guiding us says “Yes!”. Then we know we have captured the essence we are searching for.
When this happens it is very rewarding. We know we have glimpsed something great and good and we feel like we have captured a view of it.
What is the difference?
The difference is taking a picture vs making art. Taking vs giving.
When you’re at the Eiffel Tower and you think “I like that and I should shoot it”, you probably know how to make a good record of it. You and 50,000 other people that day. When anyone sees it they say “yep, that’s the Eiffel Tower”. No passion. It is just a fact. You might even want to hang a print of it on your wall. But you could get the same thing from any print on demand web site.
But when we are taken by a scene, there is an intensity and passion invoked in us. It is a personal experience. With luck and skill on our part, some of the feeling might be shared by some of our viewers.
We did not take the picture to show it to you. We had to take it for us. It was something we were drawn to. It is like it was a gift given to us.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
If it does not captivate you
I use a recent trip to France as an example a lot lately. It is recent and fresh in my mind.
I was unashamedly a tourist. That means I shot a lot of pictures because I felt I needed to record where we were and what we were seeing. Just like everyone else with their smart phones. Even though I was using a nice mirrorless camera, they were still mostly tourist shots.
Some of these are nice. That is, they are sharp, well composed, and show what I want of the scene. I will keep too many of them, but just for my own private memories.
But a few were moments where something spoke to me and drew me into an image. These times were meaningful to me. As far as images go, these were the Wow moments of the trip for me. Whether anyone else ever sees them or appreciates them doesn’t matter. They are special to me. When I go back and look at them I remember the feelings of the moment.
It’s about emotion
A common theme that recurs is that it is about passion, emotion. Did I feel anything deep or special about this, or was it a record shot? Record shots are pretty and a few will go into a slide show or book of the trip.
The really meaningful images weren’t shot to a plan and were not shot primarily to record the event or place. They may be random occurrences. But these are special to me. Times when I was truly engaged and excited by what was there.
If I wasn’t excited about what I saw, why should you be?
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Don’t settle for just taking pictures
So take pictures. But don’t settle for just taking pictures. Let’s turn up our sensitivity to hear when something is calling to us. If we are not actively listening, we will probably miss it. We know something great is there. Now we have to find it. Work the scene. Peal away the clutter. Follow your instinct. Let yourself be taken by pictures. It is worth it.
When we get caught up in a situation like this, it doesn’t really matter if all we have if a cell phone. Use what you have. But follow you passion. Figure out what is really there and get the shot. Take the gift. Appreciate it.
January 15, 2025
Why Do We See 255 Everywhere?
Do you ever wonder about the magic number 255 you see all over Photoshop and even in Lightroom Classic if you look? It seems like 255 pops up everywhere. Why is that? It is a strange number to choose.
It’s just a number
First let me say that at this point in time, 255 is just a number without meaning. It is the number chosen to represent the maximum value of a channel or color. Something has to be used to represent the maximum value. Looking back, 100 (as in 100%) would have probably made more sense. But we have 255.
Think of it like Fahrenheit and Centigrade scales. The boiling point of water is 212 in Fahrenheit and 100 in Centigrade. Either way, it represents the same thing, the boiling point of water. That does not change no matter how the number is represented.
So when you see 255 just read it as the maximum value of that thing. If that is the level you wish to understand, this would be a good point to stop reading this article. 🙂
Personally I hope you continue. Understanding some of the history and details of our tools can only help improve our craft.
Roots in binary
Before we go deeper I need to justify where the number 255 comes from. It is rooted in binary coding. You are probably familiar with digital notations. We have lived with it for so long it seems to permeate everything around us.
Please pardon me for going full on Geek here. I so seldom get to use my training that it is fun. A very, very brief background: when digital computers were being developed, it was found to be simpler and more reliable to create circuits that were either on or off, no in between states. This was called a bit. A piece of data that was either off or on, noted as 0 or 1. The advantage of this seemingly silly decision is that the bits could be made very small and can be operated on very fast.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
A single bit by itself isn’t very valuable. To represent realistic information and do calculations bits were combined together in larger units. The next widely used unit was 8 bits. This came to be called a “byte”. Eight bits is a byte – Geek humor.
It turns out that 8 bits is enough to start encoding useful information. For instance, it will hold 1 character. A byte is big enough to code all the upper and lower case letters, punctuation, and some special symbols. At least in English. And we will see that it holds a useful amount of image data.
Let me give a very simple description of digital value coding using 3 bits:
Each combination of the 3 on/off values is assigned a value. The encoded values range from 0 to 7.
Going back to the unit we called a byte, the 8 bits can encode 256 values, 0 to 255. This is the origin of the magic 255.
History of Photoshop
It is hard to think that there was a “before Photoshop”. Thomas Knoll needed to develop ways of doing analysis on images for his PhD thesis. In those days, nothing was available, so he taught himself programming and developed a library of operations. Here is an interesting interview with Thomas.
His brother John worked for Industrial Light and Magic. He saw applications for image processing in some things they were doing, so he encouraged Thomas to enhance his library. Eventually they decided to try to make it a product. Adobe was interested. It is amazing how things come to be.
In the days when the library, later Photoshop, was developed, the state of the art of image representation was to code each pixel as 3 8 bit values. One byte each for red, green, and blue. Each color had the value range 0 to 255. This number scheme became baked in to Photoshop and a standard metaphor of the user interface.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Today’s data
Early digital cameras shot 8 bit images. Today, though, images and Photoshop has grown well beyond that. As an example, my Nikon Z7 II captures 14 bit data. Each red, green and blue channel is 14 bits. That is 16384 values per channel instead of 256. Some other cameras have even more bit depth.
Photoshop allows us to select if we will treat our files as 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit. With all these variables it could impose a huge burden on the user to deal with the actual value range of the data he is editing. Some of these numbers get to be staggering (for 32 bit data each channel has 4,294,967,296 values). Adobe chose to keep the maximum number we see at 255. In effect, it became an arbitrary measuring scale we work with across the apps.
By the way, Lightroom uses 32 bit data internally. You do not get a choice. But even in Lightroom (Classic at least) the 255 illusion peaks through in one place. Look at the Tone Curve tool. The scale is 0 to 255.
Still, it’s just a number
Fahrenheit or Centigrade. It is just an arbitrary number to represent the same thing, the boiling point of water. Adobe has kept that historical number 255 and given it the implied meaning of “maximum”. It no longer has a tie to the actual size of the data you are editing or the maximum value of an 8 bit chunk of data.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
They have done us a service in this. I would hate to think of the mental complexity I would have to go through if this number changed all over the place to be the actual values I am working with. But a simplification comes with some challenges. People tend to forget why the simplification was made. Even that one was made at all.
When you are using the curves tool and other things, freely accept 255 as meaning “maximum”. Do not forget and think that your data only goes to 255. Or that it has somehow discarded all those other wonderful bits our modern cameras give us. When someone tells you that white is 255/255/255 and seem to think that is the actual value of their data, remember that is just a number on a scale. Smile to yourself knowing you probably understand it at a deeper level than they do.
I don’t have many images in my catalog that are actually 8 bit data. I am very glad the technology has moved on in wonderful ways. And I am grateful for the simplified scale that normalizes what I see when I am working with all this data. Thank you Adobe. This is something you did right. It doesn’t matter what the number is, something had to be defined as a convenient value for “maximum”.
Today’s image
The image at the head of this is actually 8 bit. An 8 bit jpg file. All the data is actually 0 to 255. Back in 2006 that was about the best I could do with the camera I had. It’s not terrible. I like the image, but I wish I could shoot it again with a modern camera.
As a matter of fact, all the images in this article are 8 bit. I wanted to emphasize that it was a very workable system.
Side note
In today’s digital systems we seldom worry much about a few bytes. Every time I press the shutter on my camera it writes about 50 million bytes to my memory card.
I mentioned that digital bits could be made very small. As an example, Apple’s M4 processor, which is their main CPU as of this writing, has 28 Billion transistors. On one chip. That is hard to comprehend. It certainly wasn’t anticipated when Thomas Knoll developed Photoshop.
December 25, 2024
The Magic of the Lens
Do you ever stop to think about your lenses, besides wanting a shinny new one? There is a magic of the lens that we seldom consider and perhaps do not even understand.
Many constraints
My perception is colored by my background as an engineer. I see a modern lens as serving so many constraints that it is a wonder they do the job as well as they do. We expect high resolving power and “good” bokah. It needs to have a good zoom range but be small. It must be weather sealed and rugged, but inexpensive. And, of course, issues like low chromatic aberration and great edge to edge sharpness and low distortion and minimal light falloff (vignetting) and minimum flare are all givens. Oh and blazing fast auto focus, too.
The poor lens designers are in a tight place. Luckily for them computer design tools have advanced greatly. Also, new materials are available to help overcome some of the design problems of the past.
Still though, we ask a lot of a professional grade lens. Probably more than we realize.
Simple lens
We have an idea in mind of how a lens works. You probably did an experiment in High School Physics with a simple lens. Then you took it out and fried some ants.
What we normally picture is a biconvex lens. Don’t let a fancy word scare you. That just means both sides are thicker in the middle than on the edge. Like this:
By DrBob at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065907
The rays (red lines) illustrate how the lens focuses on a point. That focusing is what images the outside world sharply onto our sensor.
This is true. It works. But nothing in life is simple anymore.
Reality
The reality is that, because of our high expectations and the piles of constraints to satisfy, real lens design has to be much more complex.
I am going to use the Nikon Z 24-120 f/4 zoom as an example. For two reasons: it is a representative high quality modern design, and I like it – a lot. It is my go-to lens for everyday use.
Lens design has gone far beyond the “simple” lens pictured above. Here is a cutaway of the Nikon lens:
Photography Life: https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-z-24-120mm-f-4-s
We can see that it has many lens elements (a word for a piece of glass in a lens) – 16 of them to be exact. Few of them are simple biconvex elements. Some of them are exotic glass. Things like high refractive index (they bend light more sharply than regular glass) or other properties. Some are aspherical. This means they are quite complex designs to achieve specific results. These are hard to design and manufacture. Usually they are necessary to correct for effects of other things and make the resulting image better.
Zoom
Let’s look at a few specific features. This lens has a 5x zoom range, from 24mm to 120mm. Now you would think that, for the lens to zoom 5x, it would have to get 5 times longer. This would be true for a straightforward design.
However, us users of the lens would not like that. It would have to be very big and bulky to do that. And it would be awkward when zoomed all the way out. It would be long and off balance the camera.
But complex design magic and some of those special lens elements allow them to shortcut physics. it zooms over the 5x range while only extending to less than twice it’s collapsed length. Amazing and very welcome.
Reflections
The real world is not a well behaved bundle of parallel rays coming into the lens, like in the simple lens picture above. Light is coming from everywhere. Most of it is what we want to end up on the sensor. But a lot isn’t. Light coming in from a sharp angle tends to “bounce around” inside the lens and cause a lowering of contrast. Kind of a fog look.
Modern lenses have special coatings on the glass and use some of the special types of glass i mentioned to fight this. These go a long way to canceling the reflections.
It used to be that shooting in the direction of a very bright source, like the sun would always cause unwanted internal reflections that degrade the image. Now it is amazing how little that happens. I really only worry about that if the sun is directly or nearly directly in view.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration is something we seldom consider, except when we are getting down to the last details of a final print. One of the nasty realities of physics is that each “color” of light is a different frequency. The amount of “bend” the lens gives to light is dependent on the color (frequency) of the light. This means not all the colors focus at the same point. That’s bad.
Have you every looked very closely at magnified blowup of a sharp edge in one of your photos? Especially if it is in a high contrast lighting situation. You may see a slight fringe of green or purple around the edge. This is called chromatic aberration. Not all the colors focusing together.
One of the purposes of the exotic glass and all the elements in modern lenses is to minimize this. They do a pretty good job.
But they are not perfect. Luckily it is a simple check box in Lightroom Classic to have the software automatically remove chromatic aberration.
Other considerations
If you ever carry a camera around all day you learn to appreciate light weight. Lens designers would like to design their lenses with a very sturdy metal shell and structure. But we would not like to carry that. Modern plastics and design techniques have allowed the designers to create our lenses at a more user friendly weight while still being sturdy enough to hold up to hard use. Thank you.
Did you know that some lenses make the light come into the sensor is a certain direction to make the sensor receive the photons better? Did you know that most of our zoom lenses, especially, have quite a bit of distortion and vignetting and resolution falloff at the edges? Those are some of the things that are part of the tradeoffs. But one reason they are traded off is there’s a bit of perceptual and software slight of hand.
First, we don’t notice it much. Really. We are not as sensitive to it as you would think. Unless you spend your time photographing test charts. Second, many of us set Lightroom Classic to look at the model of the lens and automatically apply a “correction” to the image we see. Adobe has a database of lenses with mathematical models to correct their distortions. This is a good thing.
As a matter of fact, Nikon has a special deal with Adobe such that the great Z 24-70 f/2.8 lens is automatically corrected in Lightroom Classic, whether or not the user selects that. It is impossible to defeat it. Hardware and software are joining in a symbiotic relationship. Making an image is a blend of both and it will only increase with time.
Almost everything done to solve one problem creates another. This is why designs are so complex and expensive. Everything is a tradeoff. It is all a question of how good can we make this property while not letting that other one get worse than a certain level.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Magic
I am in awe of these brilliant designers. They achieve beautiful balance. Like I said, I regularly use this example lens I have talked about and I am generally very happy with it. But let me emphasize that pure, unexcelled technical perfection is not usually my goal. A lens like this is “good enough” for 99.9% of my needs.
For me, as a user, I take the camera out and start using it. What I see and feel is more important than technology. Sometimes, though, my engineer nature kicks in and makes me marvel at the complexity. But really, I shoot and expect my great gear to capture what I want. And it usually does. Marvelous.
The magic of the. lens. Like most good magic, how it works is invisible to us. But occasionally stop to consider how lucky we are and what an incredible piece of technology we have attached to our camera body.
Feature image
The image at the top was shot with this Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 zoom lens I have been using as an example. This is the Hotel de Ville in Paris – their Town Hall. You can’t really tell in this small jpg, but I am completely happy with the capabilities of this lens. If the opportunity arose I am sure I could make a very good 60″ print of this. Here is a section of it zoomed to 100%.
100% section, ©Ed Schlotzhauer
Let me assure you that I am not affiliated with or sponsored by Nikon. I am just using this nice lens that I use frequently as a representative example of what a modern zoom lens is and is capable of doing.
December 4, 2024
Don’t Show It All
Not like that. This is a follow up to my last post on portfolio selection. A simple, overarching principle to keep in mind is: don’t show it all, or even most of it. Actually, not very much of it.
We’re proud of our work
A blessing and curse of digital photography is that we now shoot thousands of images. Of course, we’re pretty good, too. Everybody should like to see 500 pictures of my cat. After all, they are all different poses. And that big trip we enjoyed so much, here are the very best 900 pictures from that great trip to France. They’re all worth seeing.
We fall in love with our own pictures. This is a fact of life. Each one is special because it was exciting, memorable, unique for us. We remember what we experienced at the time. It makes it significant to us. To us, each one of those 900 pictures from France is worth showing to other people.
And when we are too attached to our pictures we tend to overlook problems that are obvious and distracting to others. The telephone pole growing out or your kid’s head is not seen. After all, it is a really cute expression. And we overlook all those people in the foreground of the beautiful picture of Chambord. Just look at how spectacular that Chateau is. It is too easy to convince our self that that tilted horizon is not a problem, or the poor composition, or the bad color balance.
But we have to be adult. Part of that means being very aware of the actual quality of our work and of what is appropriate for the situation. And in most situations, less is more.
Other people generally don’t care
I don’t want to pour cold water on your enthusiasm, but other people are not excited about what you have. That is a hard reality you have to learn.
They weren’t there. They did not experience what you did. None of these images have the same meaning or impact for them. It wasn’t their vacation, or their family, or their cat. Call up your pictures of France and hand the phone to someone to page through. If they are good friends, they will fake interest and flip through a lot of them. But even they will probably not look at any image for more than 1-2 seconds.
When they look at your pictures, they don’t see it the same way you did. They can’t and never will. Understanding this is a key to getting our images viewed by other people.
It gets much more challenging when we are wanting strangers to view our work. They do not know us, they were not there when the image was taken, it may not be anything they are interested in. But here, look at my pictures. Thanks, but I’ll pass.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Context is key
The context where we are and where and when we are presenting our images makes a huge difference. Is it to friends or strangers? Is it one-on-one or a public venue? What is drawing people to pay attention to your photos?
Pushing pictures on social media is a main venue for many of us. The audience is friendly if it is our network. They will politely scan through a few of the pictures. A few of the viewers may even give us a thumbs up to make us feel good. But did they actually see them or care? We can’t tell. And we won’t know.
And how often have we been cornered by friends who have “a few” pictures to show us? They hand us their phone, sure we will love the 50 pictures they took of the great sunset last night. It is one of those “just shoot me” moments. But if they are a friend, we have to be polite. Back in the film days it was a common joke theme to go over to a friends house only to have them get out the slide projector to show “a few” pictures of their trip. After the first few hundred we want to fake a heart attack to get away.
Up to here we are only bothering captive audiences. We can get away with little editing and selection. It will make us look foolish, but our friends will forgive us – eventually.
But perhaps we decide we’re pretty good and book a booth in an art fair. Now the audience has no connection to us and no inherent reason to look at what we have. We will get a glance as they walk by. People will only pause to give a second look if we present something that captures their attention. They will only come in to look more closely if we show them something exceptional.
Now take it to the big leagues. We get an opportunity to show our portfolio to an art director or gallery manager. That is a tough audience. These are professional art viewers. They look at huge numbers of pictures and it is their job to reject almost everything. What are you showing that will capture their attention? It better not be 100 of your best cat pictures.
How many?
How many images are in a portfolio? There is no hard rule for this. It depends on what the portfolio is for.
Peter Eastway, the publisher of Better Photography Magazine, has a nice little ebook titled “Creating a Portfolio“. It is worth reading if you can get a copy. He tries to address this and many other considerations of putting together a portfolio.
In his Australian humor, he says “The number of photographs in a perfect album is 12. Or sometimes 8. Or maybe 24.” In other words, it depends. No rules. But the number is probably much lower than you thought, and whatever you put in needs to be the best. No filler. Nothing that’s there because you want to show some variety to widen the interest.
Peter gives an interesting test. He says do not put an image in your portfolio unless you think you will still be proud of it in 12 months time. That is significant to me. I often am enthusiastic about an image, only to find I cool off toward it with time. My filtering process has built in delays. It take months for me to elevate an image to “one of the best” status. I do that intentionally to let the initial enthusiasm be replaced with a more objective evaluation.
In general, between 12 and 20 for any collection of images in a project or portfolio works for me. I would feel free to violate my own rule if I were doing a documentary or a book. Or for a multi-year project that had significant importance to me. But I would have to make a very conscious exception.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Less is more
I advocate that we take a mindful “less is more” attitude. Always take out images until it hurts. Then take our a lot more.
Remember, your audience has a short attention span compared to your view of your portfolio. Any weak image will loose their interest. They may even abandon looking at that point. I have heard it said that you will be judged by the weakest image in your portfolio. I believe it. It is human nature to find the worst as a way to critique the whole.
I consider building a portfolio kind of like an athletic contest. Teams have to compete in and survive multiple rounds of playoffs to be chosen the champion. Hopefully the best emerge. Same with our images. It is a brutal, hand to hand contest.
If you are evaluating coolly and objectively, every one removed makes the remaining set stronger. Remember, when you remove one, you are not saying you don’t like it or it is a bad image. You are just acknowledging that it does not hold up against the competition of the rest of the group. That is good. But hard.
It is very hard for me. If I want to select a project with max 20 images, I may pull at least 60-80 very good candidates. Doing the first cut is only a little painful. Maybe that gets me down to 50. I try to toughen up and go slashing again. Now maybe I have 35 left. OK, I swallow hard and cut some more and get it down to 30. Still a long way from 20.
The trouble now is that I really love every one of the 30 candidates that remain. The pain of eliminating any of then is extreme. Remind myself over and over that taking one out is not saying I don’t like it. It would be a lot easier to relent and let myself use all 30.
You would think it would get easier now. After all, I think all of them are great. But the reality is that there is a rank order to be discovered. Some are better than the others. That is what I still have to resolve. Eventually I get there. It is painful and lengthy. But a funny thing happens. I love the set that survives, and forget about the pain of the ones that didn’t make it.
The optimum number to show people is fewer than you think. When we learn that we don’t have to show it all, we can build stronger portfolios.
If you’re not your own severest critic, you are your own worst enemy.
Jay Maisel
November 20, 2024