Commentary # 17 ~ March 2008
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Looking Back, Looking Forward, and Spring Cleaning

March 2008


- by Craig Wassel


I think just about all of us have had the experience of viewing photos of ourselves in our awkward earlier years and cringing a little. We think, "Uhg, why did I wear my hair like that?" or "Why did I think that shirt looked okay?". I think most of us probably also feel that though we are a little older, we look and feel a little better, and - given the chance - we would not choose to go back to relive those days.

I feel a little like that as I look back at the younger versions of this site. I tried to do a little too much with the base graphics. I got a little bit too fancy with many of the rollovers. The navigation was not as intuitive as it needed to be. Yet when I built it, I looked upon it with pride while comparing it to the very first sites I built years earlier for a few small businesses. It's a natural progression. We don't like that we get older, but whatever it is that we do, we like that we get wiser and better at doing it. There is value in experience.

Likewise, we photographers tend to be more proud of the photos we are making now of what we took in our early days or even three years ago. We look back at ones we like, it's agonizing to know they could have been even better if only we knew then what we know now, and they pale next our favorite recent shots.

Ah, "shoulda coulda woulda oughta mighta" as my father used to say. But we can't retake those shots, and in certain respects we have to cut them loose and let go. As I tried to look at this site from a critically objective viewpoint at the beginning of the 2008, I was comfortable that I had done a good job of removing overdone graphics and pointless fanciness, and fixed the navigation. The site is now cleaner looking, and its focus (forgive the only semi-intentional pun) is the photographs and not what is wrapped around the photographs.

Still, though, there was work to be done. What I also saw as I tried to look with a critical eye were many photographs and several galleries that were giving me that feeling we have viewing those those earlier pictures of ourselves. When I originally put them on the site, I liked them more than I do now and they seemed to fit. Deep down I probably knew they would come off some day, but having a site that felt whole and complete was important, too. Until now, though, I never went back and did spring cleaning as I should have. I just kept adding on.

I could use the excuse of just being very busy or that there were more important things to get done, but if I am being honest with myself there is another reason. It's kind of like having a 10 page resume' that attempts to tell everything you have ever done, rather than a 3 page resume' that tells the best of what you have done. We are afraid a viewer might miss a little something, but what we end up doing is diluting the very best of what we have to show. So with that, I started removing a good number of photos that just didn't measure up, and actually removed three entire galleries.

As I was doing this "spring cleaning", I almost felt a little disloyal to those photos I was removing. I realized, though, that part of that was just me trying to come up with an excuse to keep them on the site and show a "10 page resume' ". Further, I reminded myself to remain loyal to my committment to keep improving and updating the site on a regular basis. I visit many photographers' sites, and one thing I notice is that few of them are updated with any regularity. To clarify, I mean independent sites like this one and not collective, dynamic sites like Flickr. I've quickly learned over the short history of this site that it is critically important to continually update and improve it.

It's taken several weeks and a very large number of hours to do all this cleaning and updating, which I guess could also be called "re-editing". It's a little tiring to know that I still have a little farther to go before I am done, but the vast improvement I see is keeping me going toward the finish line. In the end, there is an irony in it all. It is something that has been said by other photographers before in the same or similiar way, but it is still worth restating. Those photos that I now consider not quite good enough to keep on the site are stil just as valuable as the ones that remain. Those lessons of what I could do better if I could re-take them are remembered, and resonate in my brain when I find myself in a similar shooting situation. Those shots won't have a place in my "best of" portfolio again, but I still proudly keep them in my catalogue that - after I am gone - will show where I started, show the entire journey, and show the last good photo I made before the journey ended.



"It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't even amount to a couple of hours . . . 100,000 shots x (1/125 of a second)= 800 seconds = 13.3 minutes? . . . "

~ James Lalropui Keivom ~








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" . . . It's kind of like having a 10 page resume' that attempts to tell everything you have ever done, rather than a 3 page resume' that tells the best of what you have done. We are afraid a viewer might miss a little something, but what we end up doing is diluting the very best of what we have to show. So with that, I started removing a good number of photos that just didn't measure up, and actually removed three entire galleries . . . "






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