Portfolio development update

I’ve currently got 3 hours recorded for my intended portfolio development class.

I thought the best way to illustrate how I put a portfolio of images together, was to work on a set of images that I have never edited before. So in this class you will see me select, edit and review images from shot on my 2019 Bolivia tour.

I’ve just been watching some of the recorded sessions in ‘fast forward’ mode, or if you like - time lapse and it’s fascinating to get a much clearer idea of how my work tends to evolve and surface. Starting with around forty rolls of film and whittling it down to around ten images to select and edit, how the portfolio takes shape.

There is just one more hour I wish to record, and this is more intended to look at personal style, how to figure out if we have one, and how portfolio development can help us recognise and shape our own style. I think many of us believe we need to find our style and then that will inform how we choose to edit and develop our work, but I think certainly for the first while (perhaps many years) it is the other way around - we ‘discover’ our style while attempting to put portfolio’s together.

There are no rules. Just an empty canvas of possibilities. I hope that by showing you how work tends to ‘surface’ and a picture of how it all fits together isn’t obvious to start with, and only becomes more obvious as the work itself directs me, rather than my trying to direct the work - will be useful.

With anything that is creatively involved, there has to be a willingness to ‘let go’, and ‘go with the flow’. I often do not know where the work I am editing is going when I start. I give myself permission to screw up, to get it wrong, to experiment, and to back track if I feel something isn’ t working.

Often the work tells us how it wants to be edited. It gives us clues, and I think that there is often an internal battle between what we wish it to be, and what it is.

Letting go, is vital in allowing work to surface, but I think in this modern age of schedules, and expected outcomes, we are always looking for guarantees or proven results. That is not how creativity works, and it is a long challenge for many of us to stop trying to control things too much.

Amazing

Nice to see something in the news that isn’t Covid related.

Portfolio Development Video Class

Just a short note today, that I’m almost finished developing a new portfolio class.
If you want to learn how to go from here:

To here:

Then this class will be of great benefit to you.

More details about this class in a forthcoming newsletter, in the months ahead.

To be as authentic as I can be

Life events have sometimes forced me into considering where I am, what I’m doing, and what I want in the future.

My new book ‘The Sound of Snow’: Six years of winter. Six years of working towards something.

There have been life markers where I just know I’ve transitioned from child to adult. The recent loss of my dad is such a marker.

When you change career at 40 and start to run photographic tours as a living, you’re more aware of the transient nature of life. Being self employed you realise that:

Nothing.

Is.

Guaranteed.

You have to adopt a healthy dose of belief that things will just continue to work out.

You have to learn to live in the present moment more, and try to hold off worrying about the future so much, because the present is all any of us have.

You begin to understand that control of our futures is just an illusion.

I have never felt more alive than running my own business. It has always been a huge inspiration to me to find that things just have a way of working out, and ideas can grow in to solid reality.

But the last year has thrown many of us. We are all disorientated. For me, I think all the time ‘off’ has meant that I’ve become more reflective. Perhaps too much so. and I seem to have been going through a ‘life-review’ over the past nine months as a result.

It has not been something I intended, nor wished to do. But with all the free time, and the uncertainty of the future, I think it’s inevitable.

The thing that has surfaced for me, is that the most important thing for me to do while I am here:

is be as authentic as I can be.

I think that is what drives most of us when we are creating art. We all may think we want to make nice pictures, of win competitions, or whatever, but underneath it all: is a quest for something that matters. Something that means something.

Our own truth.