 How's it? How's it? Welcome back to the channel. I've been away for a few weeks in April enjoying a holiday with the family. No matter what level you are as a photographer, I think it's important to take stock of your images, to put them together into a portfolio of sorts, to be able to see if you're making progress, if your work is actually starting to develop a unique style, and to flag up areas where you could find improvement when you go to speak to somebody else who may be a little knowledgeable and say, look, I'm having issues with this. Can you suggest something? So to do this, I'm actually going to walk through with you all the photographs that I took in America last year to give you an idea about how I actually go about this process myself. And I'm going to make use of today's sponsor pick drop to help us on this project. All right. So here we are at my desktop. And as I said, we're going to make use of today's sponsor pick drop who creates wonderful online galleries that we can use to share and look at our photographs. And this is what I'm going to be using today. I've uploaded the photographs that I took last year on my visits to the States during Halloween, and I'm going to go through them, pick out some of the ideas. Initially, what I want to find are images that actually work together as a cohesive body of photographs, because you can sort of see here on the screen, right, that there's a whole bunch of mishmash on my head. And the first thing that probably strikes you is that I haven't done anything to these. At the moment, I just want to look at the images that I'm taking out of camera. So this is as they were shot. I just want to see about ideas, themes, anything that's kind of working together, not interested in processing images just yet. I'll come on to that later on once I've got a body of work together. Maybe that's an idea for another video. So what I've got here, I've got picked up. I've uploaded them. It's nice and simple. You just hit upload new files and the jobs are good. So the first thing we want to do obviously is sort through these images and make sure that we have photographs that work together. So immediately I'm seeing there's a whole bunch of stuff. So I'm going to go through very quickly. And this is more about gut instinct rather than anything else. I'm not going in and looking at them to see where the common patterns are. So already I can sort of see, do you know what? Lots of buildings. I know that these are going to be a thing because I'm just always about building. So what I'm doing here in pick drop is I'm flagging these as red because that way we can filter this later on. So I've got a bunch of street signs there. I'm not going to be able to come back for it right now. I can sort of see. OK, bang, I've got some building stuff going on. I'm not worried too much about them being inside or outside. This is really just going through. Bang, sorting them out, having a little look. See, so I'm just going to sort of flag a couple of these on right. So you come back to me in two seconds when I've gone through the whole process. OK, right. So now we have I have filtered them down since 58 of 119 photographs have been shown. Now, looking at this selection on the screen, I'm going to scroll down and very slowly. There's two things that stand up to me straight away as a body of work. The majority of these photographs are indoors. They lean into angles, shapes, the sort of thing that I like to photograph. Now, if we look at this little selection here through here, there's a couple of photographs that immediately I know feel out of place. And I wonder if you can spot it. I mean, it's sitting there. It's so loud. Yep, America, right? America, you don't belong here. It's it's the only image that has text on it. It just feels like it doesn't belong here at all. Right. So so we know. OK, fine. So we've got to get rid of get rid of him. Right. So America is gone. Now, again, now that we've shuffled up a bit, you could probably see here as well. This photograph here, I love this, this, this idea, this, this with the like extractor fan, whatever it is you want to call it. But it does not belong with the rest of them. Neither does this photograph here of the of the barn building. They've got the same sort of idea, but they do not belong, right? So we're just going to get rid of those guys very quickly. And we can see the same with these plates. Cool idea. Doesn't belong with this little selection. Neither does this photograph here, which I absolutely adore. I love it, but it's completely out of keeping with the rest of them. So they can disappear. Can you see what we're doing? Right. It's not like we're just kind of getting rid of them, but I'm distilling it down into images that work together. The same now can see this, you know, this, this thing there and this one here. I do love this photograph, but it needs to go. So I'm feeling that for this selection of images, they really all want to be indoors. And now that I'm kind of looking at that, I feel that's a fair comment. Right. So I'm going to go and get rid of everything. There's outdoors or at least features some sky. This one is actually indoors. It's underneath a pane of glass. All right. What else we got? OK. Oh, there's there's some outdoors you can you can disappear. So that's, you know, very simple way, which is already distilling down. I'm not getting rid of anything. I'm just kind of going through and making snap judgments. You can see I'm not I'm not going in, checking the focus or anything like that. This is about finding images that work together. It doesn't matter what your skill level is, how far you or how long you've been taking photographs. This is what we want to be doing when we're creating a portfolio is putting images that work together, not just a mishmash of images. Because what's happening here is I am then now going to start working on this, not physically like editing the images. What have you, but rather seeing what my style is, where can I make improvements? So let's have a look at that. Right. So I'm sort of going, OK, well, there's I like the shapes like, for example, like I like this kind of feel. It's a bit of a minimalist sort of approach. And as much as I'm drawn to stuff like this, this doesn't seem to be working. I just there's something about these these angles and these sort of shapes. It doesn't feel as strong. So I'm not going to fret about it too much. It's going to get rid of it. And I think the same way that I can see where I'm going of the red with of the handles with the concrete, I like the idea. But again, it's just not it's not doing it for me to get rid of that. And I think the same would be here with the lift. That's not really kind of kind of working. This. I'm not sold on it. So this is this is a stage where I'm sort of just going to get rid of that. Right. So get rid of, get rid of the same sort of thing here. This this again, it's kind of cool, but it doesn't feel like it's fitting in with the rest. I'm not sold on that one. I'm not sold on this one. And I'm not really you can say I'm not really overthinking this. And this is this is not me having planned all this out before. This is me literally going through these now. I'll say none, none, none. OK, that ball. I know that it's outdoors and you can see it doesn't fit with the rest. So what's the point of doing this? I find that the point of doing this is it's very easy to get hung up on trying to pick out individual photographs. Oh, I really like this. I really, you know, and and that's where a lot of people get stuck because they're sitting there going, I need to make every photograph as cool as it can be. And then I'll make the selection. And I've got 119 photographs here. Now, this is not everything that I took in America. This is 119 pictures out of a couple of hundred that I took. But they're of a star. I'm trying to make a body of work that I can show to somebody. Oh, that looks pretty cool. But also for me to see where I can make improvements by then taking it to somebody to saying, look, I've got these ideas. What can I do to improve them? What can I do to to to take this and polish it up? And we'll get into that in just a second. So I'm just going to go through these very quickly again. Once again, answer the magic of television and get down to the the finished selection. OK, well, I apologize. Anybody is listening on on headphones. So what I've done here, I've gone through and distilled it down. They were not quite finished yet because that's, you know, would be silly for me to finish it. What I'm sort of looking at here is predominantly are there any images that are kind of mimicking each other? That they're not so different that they kind of need to be in here. And immediately I'm sort of seeing this one. And this one said, now, they're very similar. It's the roof of an airport. I love airports. And I'm really not right now sold on both of them. My first reaction is to keep this guy over here. So I'm going to get rid of the other guy. Also, this one here, the organic shapes. So this kind of this this curve of the struts, it's OK because there are rectangular shapes in here. But the other ones that show up and we'll get on to the the circles in a second. It doesn't feel like it's supposed to be this way. OK, right now we're left with these. Is this guy was this guy with the exit and this guy. So which one am I going to choose? OK, so the exit I feel needs to go because this is the only one has got text. It's only one's got sign in it, so they can disappear. And now we've got the two here. But this this gentleman and this gentleman. Now, which one am I going to to keep? I feel that this one here, I like all the lines and stuff is very similar to the others. So we're going to get rid of get rid of that. OK, so there's a bit of a selection now. And again, now I'm looking at it. That circle just doesn't it doesn't feel like it wants to be there. So Bob, get rid of right. So now we have condensed body of work. And I can start to see that there's a bit of a theme running straight. There's angles, there's shapes. Now one could say, do you know what? I photograph this because I you know, I've ended up at this point because that's how I photograph naturally. And that may be so. But I've got to this point because I've done this process many times before. It's always an ongoing process. One of the beauties of something using like Pig Chop or what have you is that you can just add in photographs without having to be in Lightroom, anything like that. If you just export these as JPEGs or what have you, when you're doing your ingest and just put them into there, it's helpful because you're not able to sit and faff with the photographs. Right. So by faffing, I mean, you can't just make it black and white. Now you're going to start changing the exposure and stuff. You're seeing the photograph as it is in a in a raw format, not raw, but, you know what I mean, in its natural kind of state. So that's that's a really wonderful thing. I'm getting a feeling. I'm getting a vibe, you know, the process doesn't matter. I know I've said this a couple of times, it doesn't matter where you are in your photography, right? Doesn't matter how much experience you have or what you think your skill level is. Doing this process is fantastic because it helps you just to, you know, see the images as a body of work. This this is the beauty of this. Look, I go and then what I can do is if this is as far as I want to go, I can just hit, you know what, share bang, there you go. I've got a link I can just copy it and I'm going to stick this link in the description box below. Simple as if you want somebody else to come in and have a look at them. I've been doing this in the cohort. So let's say I'm going to I want to, you know, sit and give some critique about these photographs, right? So you've uploaded them to a to a gallery and you've sent me the link. You say, look, can you make some make some comments? And this is where we've got a fantastic option in pick drop is that I can open up this here and I can use the scribble feature, right? So I've got scribbles. That means I can just, you know, make a little how, you know, make a little ghost on there. So I would sort of, you know, because sit there and say, OK, like, let's say we want to put some photographs into into a book or if we want to put an image into, you know, competition, something of that nature. And this is where it's great to be able to make a note. You can say, look, you know, I've got this that little piece on the on the on the on the left door there. Do you know, get rid of it? Well, if we if we wanted to tidy this up and clean it, right? Because they look there's little dots here. These are not dust spots, obviously, because it's digital. But these are bits that I'm kind of looking at going, do you know what? Maybe you want to get rid of these because the whole point of this photograph is about this kind of sterile, you know, sort of coldness of industry and it so it needs to be clean. That's a wonderful idea. You know, you can sit there and I can make a comment on here. I can go to the comment and say, you know, get rid of these if I could spell, get rid of these. So save scribble. Well, there it goes. So the next person who then comes and looks along, you know, so you come along and you have a little look see and go, oh, look, there's some. Ah, OK, so Alex has made some notes for this. This is fantastic. Same sort of thing we could do if you're talking about, you know, cropping. I'm looking at, you know, this this image, for example, and I might be sitting there going, OK, well, I like the crop. It's kind of cool. I like the sort of movement or I have you. However, I'm now I'm looking at it. It does feel a bit kind of wonky. There's something that's not quite right about it. And I think maybe it's because of this stuff down the bottom here. We could get rid of that. All right. Can you see how useful this is to go through just making little notes on your own, you know, on your own photographs or as a group of people, you know, maybe at a camera club, you want to sort of share ideas and what have you. That's that's great because it means you don't have to keep going to Photoshop or Lightroom and making annotations and changing things. I've I've really enjoyed using this, as I said, with the cohorts where the people have uploaded their images and we've been able to share them together, but also to make notes on the flight to show people what's going on. Here we are back at the, you know, all of the photographs. And I think this this is an important aspect to touch upon right now is if you are taking images and you're kind of sitting there going, oh, I've been away on holiday and you just kind of have a little quick flick through and you might come up with photographs like this. OK, this is me. I took a picture out of the, you know, the wind of the car coming along. And it was an idea. It just didn't it didn't work, right? That same sort of place didn't quite work. And those of you who are sort of geologically geographically awesome will recognize this is that this is Baltimore. It you can see flicking through these. Some of them work, some of them don't. And if you look at it as a as a as a whole, it's all a bit mishmash. You know what? OK, like this, that doesn't quite work. You know, this I don't know what this is about. I think I had an idea in my head, but it was just like that was not not happening. And it can be easy to be discouraged when you look at these photographs because they are all over the place. But then go through your work. Find different ideas. There are many ideas. I've just looked at angles and shapes and stuff, but there there's light. There's there's some color. There's Burger King, right? It's all kind of things, things to explore within these. You can see. I've just looked at one aspect of stuff. But when you have all your photographs out like this, when you're going through all of them without. Prejudice, I think, you know, about, you know, whether it's going to be color or black and white, why have you? Then it makes it easy to see the little differences that you've got there. And realize that you are actually improving. This is also, you know, recently I asked people, look, how, you know, how do you feel about your photography? And I was quite surprised, a lot of guys, in fact, the majority went, you know, I'm really I'm happy with where I'm in terms of my skill set. I think I know quite a bit. And I think that's that's fantastic to hear, because, you know, it means that we're not laboring under this idea that that everybody is is struggling. But I think, you know, to polish the edges, to really to see that grows, do an exercise like this. There is a a a link for pick drop in the description box below is a free trial. Give it a try. I would be delighted to, you know, to help you to to kind of find your way in in, you know, getting a style or, you know, separating that week from the chaff. And there are a couple of spots open on the cohort that's the beginning at the end of April, which are to be awesome to have you join me. We do this kind of exercise every week. And it's a great way of being around a group of supportive photographers who are really all pulling in the same direction and getting feedback from people that's constructive, that's really helpful, that's making you move in the in the direction that you want to go. Thank you so much for watching today. It's been an absolute pleasure. If you want to check out more fantastic videos from the channel, he says full of modesty, then click on this link over here. Not that way. I've been thrown over here. Thanks ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.