I did the 20 day Portfolio renovation with Brooke Shaden and it was very informative. It has me looking at my work in new and different ways. Right now I feel my work is not cohesive in a number of ways - color, style, subject, appearance, etc. I am all over the place. This is not unusual for me as I do get bored but I don’t want my overall collection of work to suffer for it. I plan on working on sone standards for my finished work. I also want to work in a more thoughtful way and this will probably mean slowing down which will be a good thing.
One exercise was to look at a group of images and pick out your favorite and least favorite and list why. I like this idea - I don’t always love everything I post so analyzing why is a good exercise. I usually complete about 10 to 15 or so images every month and at the end of each month I am going to do this exercise. So for January I have picked my favorite and my least favorite image. I had trouble picking my favorite which is a good thing since that means I liked a lot of what I posted but there were a few I was less englamored with so not a good thing.
One of my favorites was Escape The Sea above. I like it because it is a good composition - the eye moves around the image. The overall coloring holds together well. There is a lot of action and things to see so it is interesting. It has good and correct lighting. All the parts are in correct proportion and the main image is easily defined. AND the big one for me it tells a story.
One of my least favorites is The Family Tree above. I am not all that sure why I don’t care for it but I worked on it a lot trying to resolve some issues and maybe it just has too many elements in it. Too many things shouting look at me. There is just too much going on. The coloring is OK and there really isn’t much lighting at all. It does tell a story but I am not in love with this image. Problem is I really don’t know what I would change to make it better so sometimes for me it is best to move on.
I will be blogging more about the Portfolio renovation in the coming weeks as I work through more of the information.
