This was a really nice segment, getting away from the infernal gear talk (yes, yes, I know, many people enjoy that, more power to 'em!)
I liked that Kevin got to that important point: what's the purpose, what's the endpoint, for a picture? This is, to a degree, a new issue with digital which we're just starting to wrestle with. While some people, some of them famously, left lots of film undeveloped, unprinted, the endpoint was largely clear in the film era:
- Shoot
- Develop
- Contact sheet (?)
- Print
with culling at every step. What to do with the print was still something of an issue, but at the very least you could throw it in a box and you'd be *done*.
These days you can leave a file on your computer, and go fart around with it again, any old time, and you can choose to never be *done*. Indeed, the path of least resistance, the easiest default path, is to never be done with a picture, never be done with a project, never be done with anything, but to endlessly accrete files and backups of files and bigger files and half-done photoshop jobs.
(before you charge off and start pointing out that essentially the same thing was possible with negatives, or glass plates, or whatever, let me reply with: So stipulated, but for reasons both obvious and less so, it was far less of an issue. In the old days an archive of 100,000 unexamined pictures was a monumentally strange thing, now it's basically SOP).
I happen to think that having a rough idea of the endpoint before you start is a good idea. It focuses the project, it limits you in (generally) useful ways.
I do take exception to one point: that a body of work should consist only of the best pieces. This is gallery thinking, and in these modern times it is often wrong.
A book, for instance, should generally not consist exclusively of "5 star" pictures, unless the aim is simply to sell the photographer. If the book is to have some other structure, then the pictures should be selected to support that structure, with natural ebb and flow. The same can be done for gallery shows, although it often is not (gallery shows are, generally, trying to sell the photographer, hence the "Greatest Hits" approach).
Anyways. Blindly jumping in to a presentation with a "I must show only the best images" approach is worth reconsidering. It may or may not be the right answer in context.