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.