#behindtheedit

Behind the Edit: Primary Colors

With 20,347 photos submitted and 2,397 comments on the discussion board alone, this assignment seemed to take on much more than three simple colors.  Finding the right balance and flow for a final story was certainly a challenge. Most of all, it is hard to let go of photos you love.

There were creative nature photos like the long exposure wave by Sue or the micrograph of a rock  called diorite by Bernardo. There were clever staged moments like Santa Claus in a photobooth, or works of extraordinary dreams and effort like Juan taking over the steps of Times Square with hundreds of plastic balls and a patient model.  And then there were smaller every day moments like the quirky rooster portrait or the blue motorcycle driving by the blue baskets of fish.

For most of these photographs, I found that I was more in love with the idea, the creativity and the effort, more than the photo itself.  That is one of the hardest things to grapple with as an editor. Understanding the work and efforts, comparing situations. At the end of the day you must publish what is best for the story. And these cherished photos, as much as I loved each one, were left on the cutting room floor.

-Marie McGrory, Assistant Photo Editor, Your Shot

Photographs by Juan Osorio, Bernardo Cesare,  Sue Cullumber, Arka Dutta, Ken Renk, Larry Louie, Abhishek Murmu, Francesca Torracchi, Marc Ressang, and Katrina Brown

In the Magazine and Behind the Edit: Faceless Portraits

This month in the magazine the Your Shot community has four photos in print. Two from our Faceless Portrait story and two from Tree of Life. I wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate these four photos and share a few more of my favorite Faceless Portraits that were left on the cutting room floor.

- Marie McGrory, Assistant Photo Editor

Behind the Edit: From Above

Marie, Jassen and Brian had the difficult job of editing almost 18,000 photos down to 29 for the final story in the From Above assignment. Below, they show us why these nine photos they loved were left on the cutting room floor.

The first three are Marie’s missing favorites, the next three are Jassen’s and the final three are Brian’s. Editing thousands of photos down to a story is tough enough, editing with partners can be very challenging, and an incredible way to learn and grow. The process leads you to defending the images you truly love, though you end up having to lose some as well. 

In the final edit we were looking for images that convey various levels of intimacy at different scales. We were looking for different and interesting stories and emotions. With some images, they were too similar to others in the story. The Scale, for example, has a similar intimacy and feel to the Willow and Pappou image. And the market at night was too similar to our day marketplace in Bogota. 

Others felt unnecessarily over processed. The family on the boat photograph had great composition and story, we love the contrast of the roaring water and the quiet lunch in the boat, but when it came down to the final story, we had to pull it for over processing.

Another factor that ruled out many photos were images that were slightly above, but not completely above or using the from above angle to show us something new in the scene. The dentist image was an example of this.

At the end of the day, these photographs are all quite remarkable and we hope you enjoy them. We hope this post can help show some factors that become important when you get down to your last edits. Please visit the photo pages to read the editor notes on what makes these photos special to us. 

Behind the Edit: Islands Assignment

Inspired by our recent trip to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park for BioBlitz –a partnership between National Geographic and the National Park Service that promotes citizen science, the Your Shot team asked the community to tell us the story of the Islands. 11,176 submissions later, we made a story comprised of 34 photos that best represented the cultures, traditions, and sights of islands from around the world.  However, there are often images that we as editors love and fight for that don’t make it past the rounds of editing. Below are Jeanne, Marie and Monica’s top picks that didn’t make it into the story.

Jawed’s photo of the couple bringing in the net from the water caught my eye and made it to our second round of editing. The action of the dragging net combined with the group of flying birds in the right corner and the below eye-level point of view made for an dynamic scene. In the end, the lack of caption information plus the similarity to the other fishing photos in the story left it on the cutting room floor. —Jeanne Modderman, Photography Producer 

Ranmali’s photo of the Toddy Tapper in Sri Lanka was one of my favorites that didn’t make the cut. I loved that it was a classic palm tree and blue sky scene that immediately says island, but beyond that it told a better story. The sunlit man is a “Toddy Tapper”, also known as a Raa. They extract palm oil from the trees to make an alcoholic beverage called Toddy or palm wine. Towards the end of the edit, I think what knocked it out was that despite being a strong composition, it was too hard to read. The main subject, the meat of the story, was overpowered by the palm leaves in the frame. —Marie McGrory, Assistant Photo Editor

I’ve always been drawn to photos shot in the square format—whether they are medium format film or today’s smartphones. Which is why I was initially attracted to David’s Na Pali Coast aerial and Johann’s Icelandic seagull. They are both clean shots with no distracting elements. They are simple and straightforward with the main subject obvious and clear. These are things I typically like, but when stacked against images that might have a little bit more information, a little bit more emotion, I tend to go the other way. Particularly when trying to tell a visual story, a narrative that hangs together and takes the viewer along for the ride. However, each of these photos tells their own story and I applaud them for that. —Monica Corcoran, Director

After looking at literally thousand of images I narrowed it down to about 275. Those 275 then went through 12 rounds before I narrowed it to the final selection. Here are some of the ones that made it pretty far into the final round.

I was really attracted to both of the following shots with people in them. In the end they didn't make my final edit because, in both cases, I felt the images said more about the people than the trees. It was a tricky balance to choose images that had people in them but still transformed into a portrait of the tree.

This shot made it into the final story because I felt it was about the tree and the person as one, and I believe this image does not exist without the tree.

I was asked by a member to speak about why I chose one versus the other in the following images.

Between the two, I saw this image first. I was attracted to it because I could create many scenarios about this tree on the outskirts of the city. The photographer also had his own compelling story in the caption.

Later in the week I came across this image and was also instantly mesmerized. I went back and forth between both of these throughout my edit. Ultimately I chose the night shot because it could be read on many different levels, both literally and metaphorically. However, the night sky, the lighting on the tree, and the electric city beyond also proved to be a stronger image hectically.

Finally, to give some insight into the reflection shot choice: I had also put into the larger edit several images with a reflection of a tree. This one, with the green trees being reflected, gave me a very visceral reaction sparked by the clarity of focus and beautiful light popping out of the black. It also gave me the sense that I could be among the trees in the forest in that one droplet.

However, the shot that ended up in the final story had less of a sense of place, and that also worked very well. I believe it allowed me to transcend time and space, and I began to reflect on a more inner landscape.

-Erika Larsen, Editor for the Tree of Life Story

Behind the Edit: Create It 

“We have a huge stack of the 'almosts', the ones that had minor technical issues, but became glaring when compared to the photos that worked. The photos that worked are the ones that made sense; the concept and the photograph."

The Create It assignment was the first to include guest member editors from Your Shot. With photo editor Jeanne Modderman and members Liz Andersen, Ivan Lesica, and Mike Melnotte, they looked at almost 12,000 photos and created a story out of the top 25 images. Here they talk about the images that were hardest for them to see on the cutting room floor, the almosts. 

Ivan Lesica:.

Horsing Around with Leaves, Photograph by Afreen F.

Photographer Anand Varma had the difficult job of editing almost 16,000 photos down to 17 for the final story in the Macro assignment. Below, he tells us why these three unique photos were left on the cutting room floor.

Photograph by Marianna Armata

I had just learned about frozen bubbles from an earlier image submitted to the Macro assignment, so I was very impressed that Marianna was able to capture this process in action. It's so cool to see how the ice crystals creep up the sides of the bubble. But while the ice forming on the bubble is fascinating and beautiful, I found that the rest of the image didn't have enough going on visually to compete with the other images in the final story. Had this been the only ice bubble image submitted, it certainly would have made the cut.  

Photograph by Yacine Ali-Haïmoud

I was immediately intrigued by the oddly opaque droplets shown in this image. At first I had a hard time believing they were just water droplets, but then I thought back to the many hours I've spent trying to photograph water and I recognized and appreciated Yacine’s clever lighting approach. While it is a beautifully abstract and eerie image, it didn’t teach me anything new about the world, so I decided to leave it out of the final selection.  

Photograph by Bernardo Cesare

This is one of several images in this assignment that have motivated me to learn about polarized light photography. While it is certainly an elegant image, there's a tradeoff when using microscopes for photography: I find that when a subject is so small that I can’t tell what I’m looking at, the image is much less likely to stick with me. I have a harder time relating to the subject material, so the image must work harder to be memorable. In this case, the radial structure of the crystal was perhaps too simple to hold my attention in the same way that other images in the final selection did.  

Behind the Edit: Time Capsule

"Some pictures, no matter how old they are, can feel contemporary. That is what I mean by timeless. They are executed in an inventive, interesting way, and they show subject matter that is universally human, undeniably sincere, or simply awe-inducing." –Janna Dotschkal, Time Capsule Assignment Editor