Portfolio editing ala “Brooks Jensen” and “Alain Briot” … and few more links about photo critique

November 7, 2007

Brooks Jensen, photographer and publisher of the fantastic photo magazine Lenswork, released a new podcast, "Editing as part of the creative process", where he describes his method for the selection of portfolios that make it into the printed publication. I thought you may be interested in listening to it (it is here, just few minutes long) as it highlights some of the topics that I referred to in a recent post. If you are in the mood, here it is another interesting older related podcast entitled "What makes a good Fine art Photograph".

A successful portfolio will be described with the following adjectives: coherent (body of work where the images relate to each other), high quality (avoid lower quality images, be hard with yourself keeping only the best work), different (don't repeat the work that has been shot by many others photographers, be different in subject and/or style), substantial (not too few images but not too many neither) and interesting (avoid boring images, avoid following always the "classical" rules of composition, a good image will elicit emotions and interest).

A final key aspect of the portfolio is the presentation: aim for a professional presentation that enhances the visual experience of the images. Brooks Jensen has very unique way to present his printed work that I find fascinating, he calls it "Folios".

Within the same topic, I like to link to a couple of articles from landscape photographer and artist, Alain Briot, where he describes methods to select the best images ("How to Decide Which Photographs Are Keepers and Which Ones Are Not") and also his approach for the creation of a portfoli0 ("How to Create a Portfolio of your Work").

It happens that Alain Briot has just started a videopodcast where he evaluates and critiques images sent by readers of his website. Although landscape photography is not my preferred style, Alain has extensive education as an artist and so he provides educated and interesting views of the images. What is he looking for when critiquing and evaluating images? Find it out in his description of "Fine Art Photography Review".

Within the same topic, to finish this post, I owe to link the first original videopodcast focused in the critique of photographs, the Radian Vista daily critique. Although the images are not that impressive [submitted by visitors of the website], Craig M. Tanner has always interesting points of views. He is definitively very articulated to convey the strengths and limitations of photographs with a very positive and encouraging tone.

Miguel Garcia-Guzman

Posted in Photography