Flicker Shock: Why You Should Edit Your Images.

We’ve all been there. Someone sends you a link to their “artsy” vacation pictures, you click on the link, and your first reaction upon seeing 1 of 1200 is “Holy crap! I don’t want to look at all these.” But being a polite soul, you look through your friend’s, or worse, your casual acquaintance’s, pictures trying to find a few that you can say something nice about.

This is one of those unpleasant results of having an infinite amount of storage space for images. Nobody has to delete anything anymore. So we get back from vacation all excited, send every image we shot, right down to pictures of our breakfast, to our ‘buddies and pals’ and essentially ask them to do our job, which is editing our work.

I have a buddy, a professional photographer, who used to send me links with thousands of pictures. He would say to me, “Just look through them and tell me which ones you like.” I would tell him to bug off. He thought I was being a snob. I felt a little like a snob.

But then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute. I have a website where I spent many months going through images to post only the best of the best for people to see.” I busted butt on this so that the viewer didn’t have to. After all, I’m asking someone to look at my work. The least I can do is make sure they don’t have to dig through a pile of garbage.

Another benefit is that if I only post my best work, it makes it look like everything I shoot is good.

I have a method that I use that works well for me. I look at my work, hate it, then put it away for a couple of weeks. Then I look at it again, hate it a little less, do some editing, then put it away for a little while longer.

This separation removes me from the experience of shooting the images so I can look at them more objectively. Pretty soon, I’ve whittled the collection down to only those images I really want people to see, the ones that are really my best, and, hopefully, ones they will want to see.

Often, I’ve returned from a road trip or vacation and shown people just a few images from it, even though I shot 100s. Those few images knock them out. The ones I don’t show them are anything from fairly good to putrid. But by only showing them these few, my friends are convinced that I’ll be famous any day now. I can’t argue with that. And it leaves them wanting to see more.

So please, do yourself, and your friends a favor; edit your photography before putting it out there for all to see. You’ll actually get more people to look at it; people who will like you more for not putting them through image hell.

The industrial night photography of George Ciardi has been shown in galleries across the U.S. His Douglas County photography has received critical recognition throughout the Pacific Northwest.