View Now or Later

Robin - Tehidy Woods, Cornwall

A question I’m often asked is, “what do you do with your pictures?” The answer is always the same along the lines of listing the various social media platforms, Flickr and of course, this website. Inevitably, if a fellow photographer poses this question, the conversation develops from there and enables me to ask what I find a more fascinating question: “How do you display your images?”

Often this leads to a discussion about how the process of posting to multiple platforms can be streamlined. That is not what I’m actually asking, but it does yield some interesting ideas and sometimes kicks off experimentation. It’s a good learning process even though in time, I often find myself reverting to my original methods.

But what I am driving at with that question is how do others deal with a batch of shots from a particular shoot. Let me try to explain.

If I go out to a location for any length of time, be it a day, a week, or a fortnight, I will download and back up the images immediately on return and then take my time to deal with them. This was originally born out of necessity through time constraints, but is less of an issue now. However, it does allow me to overcome the excitement of the moment and look at the images with a more considered eye.

It does go further than that though. When a particular species of bird or a rarity arrives locally, a cascade of images of it suddenly hit the internet to the extent that one can get bored with seeing ‘another Bearded Tit’ image for example. My preference is to hold back my images until the flurry has died down and then post it so that it doesn’t get lost in the crowd.

There is a down side to this though. I currently have lot of images of Red Squirrels in the snow, but if I hold back on posting these, I’ll have to wait until next Winter to post them. It just doesn’t look right if I were to post them up in July.

The alternative is to deal with each shoot immediately on completion and while that may work for some trips – an African safari perhaps – it just means the images get mixed up with all of the others being posted. I’m not at all convinced I can be that disciplined either, nor am I certain I want to be.

As with most things in photography, it’s a subjective view and what works for one, doesn’t for someone else. For now, I’ll stick with my process but remain open to reasoned persuasion.