Guggenheim Fellow - Carolyn Drake

Some of the best documentary photography I've ever seen. Meet 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship winner Carolyn Drake:

http://www.carolyndrake.com

Editing Is Hard But Sequencing Is Harder

Editing down the images you want to show to a client, editor or audience can be difficult...but sequencing images for your web portfolio is even harder.

The images above are from a recent location shoot for Rapid Growth Media and feature the accomplished artist and art advocate Paul Amenta. The shoot came out nice and I had a really hard time making selects. Each of the set-ups above had slight variations that worked well, but these were the selects that I came up with for the Rapid Growth story that felt the best to me.

I wanted to put 1 or 2 of these up into my "People" section of my portfolio site. I had a hard time deciding which one(s) to place into my portfolio and where to drop them into the flow of images that were there already in the ; should they go toward the beginning, middle, or end of the flow of images? Plus, should I separate the images inside the portfolio or sequence them all consecutively because it's the same person/shoot?

Tough questions...there isn't really a hard and fast answer. I actually don't have a clue as to what will create the most impact on the viewer coming to my site cold. I'm much too close to the shoot and am biased somewhat by the circumstances around each set-up, i.e., was the lighting more difficult to accomplish? or was something funny said that we all laughed about, etc? These are all things that might influence me, but the viewer coming cold to the images is unaware of these circumstances (and probably doesn't care).

So this blog post remains open ended as to how to sequence your work. How do you handle this issue? Feel free to drop a comment and share your ideas and, perhaps, frustrations.

Here's my "People" portfolio as it stands right now with a few of the images above dropped in.

Finding Danny Glover - Finding Clay

A couple of months ago, I needed a model for an advertising shoot for book publishing giant Zondervan. Their ad agency at Extra Credit Projects requested a model fitting a "Danny Glover type, black male, 50's with a grey peppered beard."

The shoot was on a tight timeline and we needed someone quickly. I reached out to my social media contacts on Facebook and Twitter and posted this photo of Danny Glover and asked if anyone knew of someone fitting the bill to contact me right away:

Within 5 minutes my friend Aaron over at Creo Productions emailed me the cell phone number of Clay...a guy who lived near their offices on Division Avenue.

I called Clay immediately on my way to another shoot. I explained I needed a model but had to get agency approval asap. He said he was eating pizza at Georgio's Pizza downtown and that I was welcome to drop in. I was only a few blocks from there. Within seconds I'd taken a quick iPhone shot and emailed it off to Extra Credit Projects for approval. Here's that iPhone shot:

Clay was approved right away...and we shot him a couple of days later. Clay's a very sweet man, an amazing poet and a bright light living in the resurging neighborhood of Heartside. Here's one of the shots that was submitted for the Zondervan advertisement. Don't underestimate the willingness of your social media contacts to help you when you need it most!