"Photographer's Eye"

Photographers truly do see things in a different way. (Artists in general, really.) Obscure angles, interesting models, areas or objects most often looked past, etc.

As a photographer, I tend to view the world in an artistic way. It's useful because I love being able to make the most out of a normally ordinary view.

I've got near-sightedness, but my ability to quickly see things around me and react to them outweighs my impairment. You'd think having glasses would result in having bad 'tunnel-vision' but I actually tend to have fairly good peripheral vision. (You should congratulate me for spelling that right...that and 'congratulate'.)

Anyway, my point is, possessing a 'Photographer's Eye' or really 'Artist's Eye' is a yin/yang sort of thing. It's great for the reasons above, and then some. But it can be annoying at times because it's hard to turn off. I spend a lot of time walking around in different places thinking "Man, if only I had my camera--this would be a great shot." I also see people during my daily routine that I would love to use in photoshoots, but I still haven't figured out a good, non-stalker-ish way to ask strangers to model for me. Usually I worry they'll automatically think I mean nude photoshoots, which is not the case... not until it's a required class in college, anyway!

Or more often than not, when we're talking about photography, I'll end up with way too many photos to edit and sort. Since everything (in this case photos) can be a work of art if you change how you think about it or look at it (or edit it), it's often hard to decide whether you want to keep a photo or not. I spend a long time looking through my 'iffy' photos, trying to decide if they're useless or if I should keep them just because a certain edit might look good on them.

And that is why I developed a useful system...that works most of the time.

For Everyday Photos:
1) If they're out of focus when I didn't intend it, I delete it. (I break this rule sometimes when it ends up looking good blurry.)

2) If the target is cut off when I intended to center it, I delete it.

For Photoshoots:
1) If the model is out of focus, I delete it. (Also have exceptions, like when a pose and expression is exactly what I wanted but the picture is out of focus.)

2) If I catch a model blinking, talking, etc, I delete it. Or save it into my bloopers album if it's funny enough...XD


This system helps me rule out the photos I really don't need to keep, but the pictures that are halfway between good and system-breaking are the ones I spend hours over, tapping the desk and thinking 'Yes or no?' endlessly.


If you have any suggestions for my system, I'd love to know. :)