2024 07 25

Busted car. Chicago, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

One of my strengths as a photographer is editing. I have great patience and focus and can sit in front of the computer for hours, culling my images, adjusting color and tone, dodging and burning, cropping. I enjoy the editing process nearly as much as shooting and I feel strongly that photographers can learn just as much in the edit as they can while shooting. Often these lessons are subtle and subconscious. Noticing things that worked or didn’t turn out as expected. Finding the happy accidents and figuring out how to make them less of an accident on the next shoot.

One of my weakness as a photographer is editing. I fall in love with all my children and have a very hard time reducing thousands of images made on a shoot to hundreds of selects and then just a few… the vert best… final selects. My instinct is to keep more than I should, likely because of my background in video editing, just in case they might be needed for a future edit or work well in a layout. This is all fine and dandy, but what ends up happening is the amount of time I spend making final adjustments to my two dozen selects (instead of two or three) goes up exponentially.

Right now, I’m culling through my career-spanning folders (very unorganized, of course) of best-of-the-best selects as I work towards printing a new commercial portfolio. Clearly, 75% of the images realistically don’t belong in these folders and the fact that I now need to dig through the mess to get to the good bits is making the whole process drag on endlessly. The book is due Wednesday and I have 2 pages out of 36 printed. I’m out all weekend. The clock is ticking. I need to get back to work. Wish me luck.

-Clayton