Editing a Series Down to Twelve Frames

The shoot ended with four hundred and six frames. The series is twelve. Somewhere between those two numbers is most of the craft.

Pass one: be rude

I go through the whole set quickly, with the sound off and no mercy. Anything out of focus for the wrong reason goes. Anything that duplicates another frame goes, unless it's clearly better. I'm not choosing yet. I'm clearing the table.

This takes about an hour and leaves roughly eighty. It always feels worse than it is.

Pass two: ask what each picture is doing

For every survivor I write one line in a notebook: what is this picture for? A few examples from the last series, a week on a ferry crossing:

• It sets the place.

• It introduces a person.

• It slows things down.

• It shows the weather turning.

• It's just beautiful, and I can't say why.

That last category is the dangerous one. Beauty is easy to collect and hard to place. If a picture doesn't do a job and doesn't earn a place on beauty alone, it waits outside.

Pass three: print them small

Screens flatter everything. I print the survivors at about the size of a playing card and lay them on the floor. Then I walk around them. Bad sequencing shows up on the floor in a way it never does in a folder.

I look for rhythm. Wide, close, wide. A quiet frame after a loud one. Two pictures that rhyme should not sit next to each other, or the second one reads as an echo. Separate them by two frames and the rhyme becomes a conversation.

The one I lost

There was a picture I loved: a boy asleep on a coil of rope, the whole deck leaning behind him. It was the best single frame of the trip. It was also the only one where nothing was in motion, and in a series about crossing, a still centre pulled the whole thing flat.

I took it out. I didn't enjoy it.

I have it printed and pinned over my desk, which is where a favourite picture can live without damaging anything else. If a series is a sentence, some of your best words belong in a different one.

Twelve, and then leave it

Once the twelve are down, I stop for a day. Then I sit with them again and ask one question only: would anyone miss the last frame if it were gone? If yes, it stays. If no, the series is eleven, and eleven is fine.