It’s been a productive past two months. Since starting my first full-time position at the Herald & Review, I’ve been running around central Illinois covering stories ranging from sports to businesses to ribbon cuttings to community projects and beyond. It’s been crazy, but a very positive learning experience for me. While school prepared me for this job, there are some things that school just can’t teach you, and you can only learn once you’re in the field, and I’m thankful for that experience. Needless to say, I enjoy my job.
If there’s a downside to my job, it’s one that isn’t even my job’s fault. I don’t don’t go out to shoot for myself as often as I did prior to starting work. I have a growing list of locations that I want to photograph, as well as a growing list of towns in central Illinois that I plan on spending a day in to photograph around the town. I just haven’t done any of those yet.
However, I don’t think that’s really all that bad. Before my job, I think I may have been over-shooting. I have recently been posting on social media about my over 700 4x6 prints that I ordered, containing every “good” photo that i made before autumn began this year. My plan is to order prints of every “good” photograph made on a seasonal basis. This first group was so large because it was everything going back to late 2017. A related note is that I’ll be getting my hands on an Epson V600 scanner and developing my growing pile of film, and scanning those negatives as well as my old negatives — and doing the same thing — ordering 4x6 prints of all of those.
What I’ve learned over the past year, when it comes to going through photos that don’t have homes in series or projects, is that it’s much easier on the eyes and the mind to go through them physically, rather than on a screen. Despite the fact that I’m relatively organized in my Lightroom catalogs and raw file folders, it’s a bit of a headache when I don’t really know where these photos will be sitting in the future.
I got the idea from how Todd Hido describes his editing and organization process. Before Hido makes a book, he has a physical archive of 8x10-ish size prints, organized by subject or content (such as “houses at night — guess what series that turned in to?). I began to do the same kind o organization with these 700-plus prints, and have already started to see certain consistencies and themes in my work.
As time progresses and I work on projects like Aimless Home and start to work on ideas that I’ve been brewing in the background, I’ll be doing what I can to shoot for myself on occasion. I can’t do it too much for practical reasons (photojournalists need days of from the camera sometimes, you know?), but I have been trying to go back to Bloomington on occasion, and recently went up to Chicago again, partially for the sake of making photos in an area that I’m familiar with and already know how to approach photographically. I’m still learning about how to approach Decatur-land photographically, but in time I’ll have a handle on it, and I’ll be able to go out on a day off and shoot some rolls and keep building on to my growing archive.