Selection Criteria

In this weeks workshop we looked through our street photography photographs and looked at what process to take when it comes to selecting photographs to potentially use as a final piece.

The street photography task was an interesting experiment, however, when taking lots of photographs on the move, it meant that there were many pictures that were not fit for purpose (see contact sheets for examples)

I used Adobe Bridge in order to view all of my photographs in succession.

In terms of quality, I looked out for images that had the right exposure, the subjects were in focus, there was no blurring and the images had good composition. 

I found the photographs that I had taken were very reflective of how I was feeling at the time of the shoot. I was quite shy about taken pictures of people without their permission, so I kept the camera held quite closely to my chest and took the pictures covertly. I was amused at some of the pictures that I had taken, where it appears I completely cut off the head of my subjects. With this in mind, I chose this as my subject criteria. They stood out to me visually and I found them humorous as they were indicative of the kind of photographer I am at the moment. I also chose photographs where this wasn't the case and the subjects were in full view - I may edit these using the cropping tool at a later date so they fit in with the overall theme that I'm going for.

In a series, I hope the repetition of this theme will cause a little bewilderment to viewers, but I hope they also see the humorous side to the photographs too.

Using Adobe Bridge, I selected the photographs you can see in the contact sheets and organised them into 5 categories under the following keywords:

1. Bin (for images I had no use for)
2. Definitely (for images that fitted all my criteria)
3. Maybe (for images that fitted my criteria but could use some minor editing)
4. Maybe with Edits (for images that generally fitted my criteria but required some major                                         editing)
5. Complete (this would remain empty until all editing is complete and I have a series of                                pictures ready for exhibition)

To begin with I was fairly overcritical and decided to bin a lot of my images. It wasn't until talking through my theme with my module leader that he pointed out that a lot of these images could be edited to fit my needs and to keep hold of ones that fitted the quality criteria and think more carefully about what could be done later in order for them to fit the rest of my criteria.

The contact sheet was beneficial in this task, allowing me to view images of the same subject next to each other for closer comparison.