Experienced photographers often advise us to develop photography projects by looking through our own image catalogs for a hint about what we tend to see, or we like to shoot. Or, possibly, what we don't see or shoot.
It's plausible advice, of course. Knowing yourself is, no doubt, a good way to develop as an artist and casting a cool eye on our own images is one way to know ourselves. Probably.
Still, when I browse the images, most still RAW, in my small catalog (25k images) I don't alway find things that merit a second thought.
I tend to wind through a particular shoot or a series of dates. Sometimes, I need to do this. But when I'm just looking for things that might catch my eye (again), I find this kind of searching mostly unproductive. It is usually too 'directed' to turn up anything surprising.
I think the reason is, when I'm right-arrowing through the images in a shoot, it's too easy for the remembered context to rob an image of any 'surprise' factor that it might have when seen outside that context. I probably don't see most images with the freshness they deserve.
But when I'm noodling around looking for an idea for a new project I want to look at my photos more objectively: neither skeptically nor defensively. I want to see them with "fresh" eyes.
One tried-and-tested method of finding stuff 'by surprise' is to go to the LR library filters - Text, Attribute, Metadata - and set a few random filters on the whole catalog. Say:
- The second half of March between 2009 and 2014;
- All images shot with a lens focal length under 24mm. ]Images shot with a camera I haven't used since... (goodness knows!). All macro images.
- Images with a square aspect ratio.
- Images taken in Pakistan, or Paraguay or ...
- Images with any stars, but flagged as "rejected;
- Images with color tags whose meaning I've long-since forgotten;
- Images with keywords "process" or "keeper" or "ugh!"...
Here's
another method that I've just discovered.
Download the
Excire search plug-in from Excire.com. It's an LR plugin that creates a pattern-matching database of the images in your catalog. Once populated with data about the images, it will identify images that are 'similar' to any given image (and optionally copy the keywords from the selected image to all the 'similars' it finds).
There's a full-function 30-day trial you can install. You have to "initialize" the database by allowing
Excire to examine every image in your catalog before the search will work. This can take an hour or so (my case) or several hours or overnight (the Excire recommendation). Once that's done, finding images (10 - 500 as you choose) that are "similar" to any given image is pretty much instant (there's a keyboard shortcut). Excire puts them all in a collection for you.
How "similar" are the "similar" images? Well, here's the thing.
Excire gives you no control over that. It seems to determine similarity using color and contrast (?) and content patterns. It's not clear. Nor does the plugin offer any user control over the degree of matching required for 'similarity'.
As a consequence, the matching is, well... surprising. In my experience, photos of objects tend to match well with other photos of similar objects. Excire also allows you to choose faces, including the number of faces and even 'elderly' faces. But most matches seem to be just the sort of thing that a robot might come up with. No surprise there. You can usually sort of see, in retrospect, a possible basis for the implied similarity. But not in every case.
Still, that's a Good Thing. I've seen a lot of predictable pattern matches, especially on shoots where I shot-the-hell out of some subjet to make sure I had a lot of choices when I got back to my desk. But I've also seen many search-result sets that are surprising enough to be 'creative'.
For example, a recent search turned out to be shaped by a color pattern that "kinda, almost" matches in extent, tiling, range and depth a shot of the waters' edge on a rocky beach in southern Australia, an Egyptian tomb-wall decoration featuring vultures, a cactus border in an informal garden, a metal sculpture in the Reina Sophia museum in Madrid and lily-trash floating in a pond in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.
Now, in that search there were a couple of dozen other images too (several almost identical to the image I started with). But six of the images in this search result - all but two taken with different cameras, spread over nine years including photos from before I got "serious" - were... Well, sort of inspiring as a
set.
Inspiring what I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it. As I look at the images, I recognize the similarity. But it's the differences and connections that jump out at me; differences and connections that a search robot knows nothing about (of course) but that are sort of suggestive. Maybe creative.
What I did was try to reprocess some of the images so that they looked more like they made set but kept their own "personality". Then I saved them as a new collection. Something to think about. Maybe to extend or reconfigure.
I am pretty sure this is NOT what
Excire software is really for. I'm sure there are serious professional uses (wedding photos, I expect).
Still, I recommend you try it just for fun.
Excire comes in two versions priced EUR49 and EUR99.
Best,
Peter