Friendly Editing

As I’m packing up to leave for the Olympic National Park, an idea popped in to my head and the best way to describe it would be to call it friendly editing and it’s something I would encourage you to think about trying out.  What is friendly editing you ask?  Well, it’s an exercise in experimentation and trust, involving one of your trusted photo friends and one of your images.  What would happen if you agreed with your friend, so send them one of your images for them to post process, for the purpose of seeing how others might 1. interpret the photograph and 2. how they might choose to apply edits to the photograph?  I know, I know, the post processing is part of the imaging process and it’s in the artists head what they want the final result to be.  However, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to see if your intent comes through in the composition/capture and then how someone else might apply this?  Food for thought.

The reason this came up for me is that I was going through one of my image folders from the Palouse, pulling out a few more from last year that I hadn’t processed yet and as I was working on an image, I realized that this is a fairly standard image from the Palouse and I had no great intentions or story with it, just a nice comp of the rolling hills and stormy sky.  Being a “standard” image for me, I proceeded to process it like I normally would, not giving a lot of thought to any great editing intentions…balance the exposure, bring up the vibrance, add some midtone contrast, add some Orton effect, vignette, boom, done!  The other realization that I had during this was that some of my processing has become repetitive, which brought up the question, could I do better instead of following a particular format that I normally apply?   Which of course led me to the questions, “how would someone else process this image?”.  Which led me here to you today to talk about friendly editing.

This is the kind of image that would be great to send to one of my friends who I trust, and who’s editing is in the same ballpark as mine, to see how they might approach this image.  I don’t have a particular end goal in mind with this image other than “pleasing to look at” so I’m not married to a particular end result.  Are there other edits that they would make knowing that they wouldn’t be following a normal script for editing such an image…or they may be following a script that’s particular to them, not to me, which might end up with a different result.

As a professional, I have viewed hundreds of thousands of images over the years and edited thousands of my own.  I am very secure in the knowledge of what I like, how I like it, and what edits I like to make to particular types of images.  Does this mean I’ve lost originality in my editing workflow?  No, it doesn’t.  When I have unique images, or images with unique conditions, I jump at the chance to apply unique editing steps to get to my end result.  But for standard images from locations that I’ve been to dozens of times, I know how to edit these images and they don’t require a lot of thought or a unique approach to produce an acceptable output.  If I captured a shot with a unique intention for the finished image, then yes I’d approach my editing differently.  For a shot like this one here, there is nothing unique or special about it, other than it’s pleasing, so my editing followed suit and was my “standard Palouse” type of editing.

But back to friendly editing.  I would encourage you to think about sharing one of your images with a friend and have them take a go at it.  It can be a fun friendly exercise for both of you.   Reach out to someone you want to do this with, give them some guidelines if you want, or don’t, and then send them the image to work on.  When they return the finished image, it can be a great conversation between you two to talk about what they saw, what they did, why they did it, etc.  I can say I’ve done this quite a few times with some trusted friends and I’ve always learned something about my photograph or about how others “see” my photograph and how it may be different or similar to my own views.   I’ve explored with my friends different editing techniques they used on my photograph and when I liked it, I have at times incorporated some of their technique in to my own workflow.

I am a continual learner and really enjoy getting different perspectives on my work.  Not that I shoot to please other people, but I do appreciate others honest opinions about my work, which may inform my future work or at least how I see the world a little bit broader incorporating others perspectives.   I know most of you are also learners because it’s a big part of this hobby of photography.  New gear, new software, etc…for us to learn.  So, why not add to your learning with someone else’s honest opinion about your work and their interpretation of it through an editing exercise.  Friendly editing can be fun and informational.