Selecting and Sequencing Photos
When your subject is in motion, always make sure there is more negative space or area in the direction of travel. Photo and text by: Annalise Kaylor
A few years ago, I applied and was accepted into The Kalish, a visual editing workshop held at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Named for legendary picture editor and author of “Picture Editing,” Stan Kalish, the workshop is designed to help photographers, photo editors, and other visual storytellers elevate their craft. Attendees are juried into the workshop and my week there changed my professional trajectory and the way I work as a photographer.
I’ve written enough about photo editing here that I think most of you reading this understand that I’m not writing about editors as people who physically edit your photos with Lightroom or Photoshop. Though that can and does happen, the main job of a photo editor is to select and sequence photos much as a magazine editor works with writers. The point is to tighten the story (visual or otherwise) and make a better presentation of the visuals as a whole.
But this is where a lot of photographers get a bit flummoxed. We hear it all the time in our workshops, “How do you decide which photo is best?”
We all have our methods for culling and selecting the photos we edit. Jared and I, along with most working photographers I know, typically go through their shoot in a few passes, or rounds of selection. I won’t dive into that here, since we’ve covered it before, but I can’t express enough the importance of reviewing your photos with a critical eye. It’s not uncommon for both Jared and I to come back from a shoot with 10,000+ images and end up with only 100 that make it to the final round of selection. And with that, I usually end up with about 10-20 images that I’ll actually edit and keep.
Once you’ve whittled your photos down to your selections, take a look at your favorites from this outing. Easily skipped over, this sort of holistic look at your work holds quite a few clues as to what you’re doing well and what you’d like to improve upon. When you look at the collection as a whole, you’ll start to recognize your strengths as a photographer. You’ll also see your visual style patterns emerge and if there is something you don’t do enough of when you’re in the field. For example, when I looked at my Yellowstone collection via the Contact Sheet view before heading out there this past winter, I saw that I needed more environmental portraits.
It’s not just enough, though, to have a collection of great photos. When it comes to submitting your work, whether that’s to a gallery for potential representation or to an editor for a photo essay pitch, or even for your own website, the sequence in which your photos are displayed is also important.
How photos exist in relation to one another is an art in and of itself, as I learned at The Kalish. We tend to think of sequencing as one picture after another, without a whole lot of thought as to what the collection says overall. Just like a good book or movie, there needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A broader way to think of sequencing is about creating relationships between a set of images. This thought process becomes more important when the photos you have are not exactly linear or literal. Where the work will be displayed, who the intended audience is, and the medium of the presentation are all considerations.
Right now, the editor I’m working with at my agency, for example, is sequencing out my portfolio to the three target areas I’d most like to work. He's designing my photographs into a cohesive presentation that will better compete with the other photographers in my areas of concentration, while also conveying to the editor/creative director that I am not just a one-shot photographer, but a photographer who ties everything together.
From my photojournalism days, I have an enormous archive of concert photography with everyone from Earth, Wind, and Fire to Elton John to Macklemore to Kanye West in it. These photos will still exist on my website, but they won’t be linked to my home page. Concert photography is the only genre of photography that I think is harder to make a living with than wildlife photography. It’s not what I do anymore, so while I’m really happy with a lot of those photos and they pack an impressive punch, they will never resonate with the people with whom I’d like to work. My concert photography tells an editor at a climate change NGO nothing about how I can tell their story. So there's no need to communicate that strength and off the main website it goes.
When you’re considering the audience, there is a high likelihood that some of your best photographs will not make the sequence. What I’d show an editor of a magazine, which is much more narrative is not what I’d show a gallery owner, which is much more artful and has room for the more conceptual.
Regardless of who is going to review your images, there needs to be a thread of consistency in every image beyond only the subject. Nothing distracts from your photos like a jarring jump from one photo to the next instead of flowing from one photo into another.
Outside of the subject (e.g., Coastal brown bears) here are some other visual variables to consider when it comes to sequencing:
How does the light quality and direction play from one photo into the next?
Is there a way to make the color part of the sequence?
How can the distance from the camera to the subject convey something specific to this set of photos to make them feel cohesive?
What compositional aspects of each photo feel like they move in and out of the photos?
How is moment value playing into the overall series?
These five questions stem from the five creative means of photography: light, color, distance, composition, and moment value. So while you should consider the quality of those elements on an individual photo basis, it’s also important to look at what they have in common with the rest of the set, too.
Just like any good story, you want to start strong with one of your objectively best images and end with a photograph that leaves an impression. Visual sequencing and storytelling are much like flying in an airplane - we can forgive a whole lot of turbulence in the middle of the flight as long as the takeoff and landing are smooth.
The most common approach to sequencing is what the photography editing world calls the “lyrical approach.” This approach lets the visually emotive qualities of the photographs play into and against one another. Lyrical sequencing gives a bit more breathing room to a photo sequence, allowing it to not be tied to just one theme (e.g., Linear, like the order of the photos by time/date), but move between the purely visual, the informational, and conceptual all in one swoop.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to sequencing. Much like photography, you’ll find your overall style and approach. But there is a bit of an industry precedent here. I use “precedent” because I see the art form of photo editing ebb and flow as much as photography does.
Here is the general process for developing your first sequence of photos:
START WITH A SET OF IMAGES
Start with a working set of photographs for the sequence you’d like to put together. Select the strongest photos worth considering, thinking through the five creative means of photography I wrote about earlier in this article. It’s my experience that you should choose double the photos that you want to end up with. For example, if you are putting together a 10-photo entry for a contest, then pick 20 images to sequence from. If you’re working on a photo book and you’d like it to land around 100 photos, start with 200 of your best work to choose from.
ANALOG OR DIGITAL
Make prints or use software. I personally still love sequencing with prints, especially if it’s for a promo to send to editors or for a gallery submission. For a gallery submission I cannot recommend highly enough having your work printed. I usually print 5x7 photos for this, and I use a lab like WHCC or Miller’s to make quality prints that are still inexpensive to me. These are your working prints so there is no need to choose fine art papers or the highest end print, just choose something with a nice satin finish.
If I’m creating a sequence digitally, I use Lightroom. I have my selected images in a Smart Collection and then I work through them within the Filmstrip. I often use the split screen comparison (the XY icon or hit “c” as a keyboard shortcut) to decide between two similar photos. I’ll also use the Survey view (N), which will pull up all the photos I’ve selected into one screen. This is an easy way to see what the collection looks like all together as a set.
MOVE IMAGES AROUND
Whether via print or computer, go through the photos and choose the ones you think would make a compelling first image. This part is truly the most challenging part of sequencing. If your photo is too esoteric, it will confuse the viewer or cause them to not engage. If it’s too simple of a photograph or too literal and direct, it can cause people to pass over your photography. Instead, look for a photo that is in the middle ground, skewing toward a bit more “wow” factor. This photo should pique interest and also have enough context around the photo to be clear about what it conveys and what someone looking at these photos is getting into. To paraphrase W.M. Hunt, the collector and curator, the first photo should both intrigue and inform - one without the other is boring.
Put that first photo in the top left of the space you’re working in. Now plays every other photo in your selection next to the first photo and look at how each works with the relationship of the five things. Is light carrying over or does it pick up where the first one left off? Is there a similarity that feels like a natural flow? Do they relate to one another? Keep going through the process until you have them all sorted into a sequence.
If you’re using Lightroom, make a slideshow out of your sequence and see how it feels as you go through them. If you’re using prints, look at them one by one and see how they feel as you flip through them. Do this every time you get a few more photos into the sequence. Doing it over and over again as you work through the order will make it stronger.
Choosing the last photo is about as difficult as choosing the first. It’s important for the first photo and the last photo to relate to one another, too. This is called “bookending” your sequence. This is especially important if your photos will be displayed as a looping slideshow. Viewers won’t necessarily know the intentional beginning and end of the slideshow so the last image needs to connect, or even serve as foreshadowing to the first.
As you work through the sequence, you’ll see why I suggest having double the images you need for your submission or website or pitch. You’ll see that some images that are remarkable on their own aren’t compatible with the series as a whole. Not only is sequencing a way to present your work and review your own work, but it helps you develop a new way of seeing what you photograph when you’re in the moment in the field.
This is an extra skill that will help set you apart from the competition. At The Kalish, I heard first-hand from several Nat Geo editors, including Elizabeth Krist, the senior editor there for almost 20 years, that their biggest issue in finding new photographers is the lack of a cohesive sequence or “edit” of the submissions. Other publishers echoed that sentiment, that photographers tend to send in what they think are only the best images but there isn’t anything that connects them together. They want to see a narrative, even if it’s as simple as something like negative space, or maybe a series with an orange theme that starts with a sunrise and is gradient to a sunset by the end. Or maybe it’s a linear story over a period of time.
Giving photo editors, curators, gallery owners, assignment editors, art buyers, and other professionals a thoughtfully sequenced series will show off your depth and breadth as a photographer better than any random assortment of one-off images. There are millions of photographers who can make beautiful single images. There are far fewer who can go well beyond that.