Stop Caring About What Others Think Of Your Work

Start thinking about what YOU think of it.

You can do this in three stages; before you shoot, while you process, and months later. If you are wise, you can synchronise these three periods so that you are eventually satisfied, rather than disturbed.

a. You are going to shoot a picture. Why? Where? Who? What? Ask all the Kipling questions and get good answers ready for yourself.

Then figure out the places, spaces, lights, equipment, timing, people, props, products. Allow for mistakes, breakages, folly, and interference; success is not guaranteed, but these are.

If you allow yourself wiggle room you can minimise them. If your project needs about forty miles square around it before the blast is reduced enough to allow the camera to survive, rethink that swimsuit shoot. Bikinis need not be shot with ALL the original 50's procedure...

b. The processing room. Or processing table in your local café. Or your processing knees on the train home. Now which place do you think will aid in better thinking and photo work?

Right. You know what you wanted to the picture to look like before you pressed the button - now carry that forward in the size and shape of the file, the cropping, the colouration and sharpening, etc. You can depend on the default of the program or you can tell it what to do, but if you are going to take command, do it for a good reason. Wear yourself out in digital adolescence long before this.

Note: if processing involves water, chemicals, dark spaces, and a lot of bad language, I know where you are and what you are doing. I have long sold off my darkroom gear but I can write out some words you can use when the film won't go on the reel.

Boil the digital dinner as you wish, and plate it out on a screen or through a printer. Get to a finished point, and finish.

c. You're not finished. Wait three months and look carefully at that final result. If it is good, you are finished.

If it is not, hie back to Lightroom, line up your raw file in the develop module where you last left it, and fine-tune it again. Then export it and wait another three months.

If you are awarded the Prix d'Or in the meantime, or jailed for showing the image, you need not wait that extra time.

The end result is you have something you approve of...and the world can look at it, or at you, as it pleases.

Text by Richard Stein