Check Point Charlie, Berlin May 2013.
My home town Peterborough is great for street photography but felt I needed more variety and an international flavour to my website so I have recently sought and found inspiration in Berlin and Amsterdam. I took two and half thousand images in the former and thought I did well to whittle it down to 160 for my website.It concerned me that by taking so many, which I would never have done with film, makes me a poorer photographer but I feel use the technology,whatever works and the proof is always in the pudding! Most I deleted for technical reasons due to wrong exposure, out of focus or blurred and aesthetic reasons such as just boring or spoilt by poor composition. In my defence the very challenging nature of street photography makes this inevitable some of the time and better to seize the moment and capture an image than to miss it.
Award winning photographer, photo editor, journalist and film maker Martyn Moore created a beautiful website for me and it drives me to walk for miles and has transformed my photography. I try to do it justice by posting the best but find after all the effort, time and expense very reluctant to press delete but I have been fortunate to have Martyn as a good friend and mentor to help me through this process. As he points out photographers often make poor editors of their work as they are too close and like me do not want to let go of hard won images. I welcome this positive critiquing and I am trying to adopt his 'less is more' and that if you post too many it dilutes and devalues the strong images and viewers soon get bored.
There is no substitute for getting it right first time in the viewfinder and I always have in the back of my mind when I am taking photographs that the image needs to be technically correct, with good composition, unfussy back grounds and something unusual with wow factor. So I set my stage and wait or roam with camera primed on fast drive and perhaps take ten shots to increase my chances of capturing that unique gesture or expression. I cannot do Photo shop so keep it simple with a little editing and it is great to have this second chance where cropping can make all the difference. The next stage is to pick out the best image which is usually obvious and the other thing Martyn has taught me is not to post similar images and rightly points out ( see above) it is he who mainly makes films and my role is to tell a story in one image.
To help me improve my postings and to a start an editing debate Martyn has added his 'Berlin - editors choice' http://www.chrisporsz.com/berlin---editors-choice.html and selected his 51 favourites taken from my adjacent 160 Berlin images. Let us know what you think of the selections and Martyn and I will reply.
As an added incentive a FREE copy of my popular book New England goes to the person who gets the 'Editors Berlin Choice' down to 50 by telling us which one image should go and why. Secondly select one image from my Berlin 160 that you feel should have made the editors choice and why. Reply by clicking the contact box and closing date is June 5th. Watch this space as a second free book will be offered shortly on the theme of mono or colour.
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