Back of the head

The ultimate aim for my web site is that it will host several sets of themed photos that make sense to me. I used to have quite a few themed collections on the site, but I was unhappy with some aspects of the collections and have taken them down to give them a spring clean. In the meantime, an old and incomplete edit of the Country Show series remains along with a recent OK selection of the seaside shots, which need sequencing. I find it hard to do a “definitive” edit of the seaside shots for the web without a definite aim in mind, partly because I have so many of them...

On the other hand, when I exhibited a selection of the shots for a show in Antrim (a specific task) I selected 36 prints and a sequence and was pleased with the results for that particular project. There’s probably only a dozen shots from the seaside series that are “untouchables” and on a different day and mood, I may well have picked a load of different additional shots for that show. Of course, an edit for a book (Blurb or otherwise) would be another completely different task. With that in mind, I’ve just uploaded an alternate edit of 30 seaside shots that I put together for an application (another specific task) that I think work quite well as a series. It’s not a “greatest hits” of the seaside shots – in fact I have sacrificed a load of the stronger pictures to create a sequence of photos that I think works quite well, like the Antrim series. But different.

I’m sure the few “back of head shots” will not be everyone’s taste – but they are actually there for a reason that makes sense to me in the narrative. I’ve shown the seaside series in various forms to dozens of people whose views I respect and got dozens of different opinions about which shots should and should not be included – always helpful, but always different! So, of course, in the end you have to make your own selection bearing in mind the task in hand, a distillation of the dozens of conflicting pieces of advice you have been given, and, most importantly, your particular vision of the project!

Edit (21 January 2009): and, as if by magic, in the last couple of days I've been asked to provide an edit of the seaside photos for another project. Time to dig into them again...