How to Better Evaluate Our Pictures

A Guide to Choosing the Right Shot

Choosing our best work is often harder than creating it in the first place. Photographers, like writers, have natural blind spots when evaluating their creations. But there are techniques that can help us do a better job of deciding what’s good, and what needs more polishing.

Photography is a fascinating endeavor because it’s a combination of technical prowess and artistic vision. Successful images stimulate both sides of the brain.

When presenting pictures to others, photographs can be criticized due to imperfect focus, dull exposure, or unnatural color in one breath, then bemoaned for lack of emotion in the next.

Fortunately, we can head off much of this criticism by practicing a few basic techniques when deciding which images to release into the wild. Let’s take a look.

Content Analysis

Have you ever looked at a perfectly exposed picture and felt absolutely nothing? I have. And that includes my own work.

Sure, technical elements are important, and we’re going to address them in the next section. But they don’t mean much if the photograph doesn’t speak to the viewer on other levels. It has to say something. That’s why I start with content analysis before…