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From the Cutting Room Floor {January 2018} | Photography

It's no secret that I take a lot of photos. So far this year alone I've snapped off around 17 and a half thousand frames. Not all of those frames are personal images obviously, there's quite a lot that have been taken in the course of my work and that number does also include some of the video clips I've shot for various films.

I don't edit all of those images either. There are many times when there are multiple images in a row with only slight variances, owing to the fact that I'm shooting fast-moving children and in those cases shooting in burst modes improves the likelihood that you'll get a couple of keepers.

I also like to experiment a lot, and as with all experimentation, there is plenty of things that don't work. But when something does work, I like to then try it again to try and replicate and improve on my results. Which obviously means I'm going to have a lot more images to sort through. Thank goodness for Lightroom and it's super organising abilities!

With so many images, it's only natural that a very small percentage of those end up being shared online or printed. I put a lot of images of the girls on my phone, but I often only share what I feel to be my very best images online, or ones that have really spoken to me for one reason or another. A lot more images do get printed into my yearly photobooks and I love that I can often tell the complete story of our days via these images.

If I'm going to be completely honest about it, I often feel like there's a bit of a disconnect between the images that I love and that speak to me, and the images that I share online, and particularly on Instagram, because sometimes (often times) those images don't really fit in to what gets liked online. It's a struggle that I think every photographer and artist has, the struggle between posting things that will be received well and get likes, and posting things that speak to us as an artist and that are maybe not technically "perfect" or what fits in to the current trends, but that are more true to our artist heart & vision.

I've struggled with this a lot over the last year and I'm just now starting to take baby steps and throw off the "like" shackles and be true to my work and my vision. It's so easy to get caught up in the need for online validation, and while I'm not going to get over it overnight, I'm taking small baby steps towards that. Creating this series of posts is a step in that direction. I'm hoping that by publishing them here on the blog it will give me the courage to continue pushing myself and exploring my creativity without the "like" validation getting in the way.

So here's the first installment, images from the cutting room floor, shot back in January 2018...


































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