3 ways to help you make more interesting photo albums
What do you say when your friend asks you: “Hey want to see my photo album from my adventure in Madagascar?” You sigh and try to weasel your way out of it because it’s a boring prospect — sitting there for hours while they skip through 1000’s of boring photos looking for that one good shot they took while simultaneously telling you that it’s worth the wait…
Don’t let this be you. Here are 3 tips that will help make your presentations to your friends short, interesting and best of all, easy!
It starts before you even take your photos. Think about the fact that you are going to be showing your photos to an audience, so you must select which photos go into the presentation. The key is to ask not how you choose, but when you choose.
- Don’t take the shot.
The first and most important filter is the filter that digital cameras have all but relegated to oblivion: don’t take the shot. If you are about to take a shot that you think is not so great, don’t take it. Digital cameras instil the attitude of “just take it and decide later”. With the old film cameras, every shot cost money, so you always thought twice about actually taking a photo. These days it’s more a problem of what to do with the gigabytes of photos that you will never ever set eyes upon again.
2. Delete them while they are still on the camera.
When you have some downtime, when you’re bored, waiting for a bus, sitting on a beach enjoying a cocktail, on a connecting flight, pick up your camera and start deleting photos. Out of focus, duplicate, boring, wrong settings, too bright, too dark, wrong lens… delete them all while you have nothing else to do. This kills several birds with one stone: you are no longer bored, you are putting some time into your presentation, you are saving SD card memory, you are saving file transfer time and you are staying conscious of the kinds of photos you are taking.
3. Delete ruthlessly while processing.
So you have transferred the photos to your hard drive and are editing them in Lightroom or the like. You have a collection of potentially sound candidates for your album. Maybe there are some that you took in low light that you are hoping can be saved by some Lightroom magic, or you are hoping will look better on a computer screen than on the camera’s LCD. Now it’s time to tweak them and see how they fair in contrast to your other photos. Like Marie Kondo says, and I’m paraphrasing, if you look at it and it doesn’t bring you joy, delete it.
Once a week I will post a travel photography tip. Sometimes a large one, sometimes a small one. The idea is to help you become a better photographer while travelling in a foreign land taking the most interesting pictures of your life. Enjoy!
