Best Of

I shot this a year ago on Haight Street, while B was off at a hair appointment.

I'm about to try an exercise where I pick what I think are my best photos of the year that I've posted, then ruthlessly boil them down to 10 or so picks.

One of the hardest things in photography (certainly for me) is to edit and cull your own work. In part, this is because it is hard to be critical of things that we love. In equal part, there is an almost inescapable association between the emotions that accompany the taking of a photo with the feeling it gives you -- every photo is a key to a door that leads to the memories and emotions tied to that time and that place.

This task is also made only harder by the ubiquity of digital, where it's easy to take hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of images over the course of a year. The dark side of "pixels are free" is that "attention is priceless". If you want your photos to be noticed by people, you need to have a visual elevator pitch ready -- a short, pithy summary of why your work is worth noting.

This is as true if you do photography for art, journalism, or even for memories -- less will be more, until we all live a lot longer (and even then, longer lives will probably follow the same curve for attention as hard drives do for being filled up).

Of course, the really hard part: I'm still not done processing for the year. ;)