9 The Cutting Room Floor: Be Selective
>
o
<
If you follow chapter 5’s advice, you’ll end up with a lot of material, so much so that you might not know what to do with it. But once you’ve arrived at post-production, you’ve reached the cutting room floor…so now’s the time to cut. Be very selective with the pictures you retain. Settle on one picture per subject. Always keep only the best one, and put the others out of your head. This is sometimes difficult to do, but self-restraint is key to maintaining your ideal collection. So how do you settle on just a single photograph? One photo may have the better light, while the other has more compelling emotion. After a while, they may even all start to look exactly the same. The question to ask yourself is: when it comes to the perfect shot, which quality trumps all? For yourself, perhaps emotion is the key indicator of perfection; for another photographer, the composition may trump emo-tion. Showing multiple photos of the same shot is not an option, as doing so will only attract attention to their respective weaknesses and will steal the soul from your photography.
This is the same setting as the photo in lesson 3, but there’s one difference: the boy is sharp, while the barbwire is slightly unfocused. Technically speaking, this is probably the better picture. But my preference lies with the first picture, due to the expression on the boy’s face. Therefore, I chose to discard this one and, aside from training purposes, no one will ever see it.
In the selection of photos above, for each pair I kept the left one and discarded the right one. As you can see, each photo has its merits, and some viewers may prefer may not agree with my choice. This just goes to show that personal preference comes highly into play in the cutting room. Often selection is one of the most difficult tasks for a photographer.