Edits

This is Ed Templeton signing copies of his latest book at Arcana Books. One of the best photo books stores on the planet and it happens to be 2 minutes from my house.

I was blogging about how different editing for books is vs. editing for zines, prints, and internet. Each seems to have its own dialect, boundaries, and obstacles. As you get older you find out that you may be more fluent in some of these languages than others.

It’s easy to say that a “winning” photo would translate on any medium, sure. But that is the short game. The long game isn’t about 1 photo, it’s about all of your photos and how you choose to set them free into the world. Maybe one will end up on a wall in a mansion in Malibu, maybe a big group of them will end up in a book on a shelf at the thrift store.

When you are making these things you get into the subtle dimensions like paper texture, ink texture, stiffness of cover, etc. Then you have the literal dimensions of the book and the spine width. Then you have the 4th dimension of time, the physical flipping of the pages and the sequencing of photos.

On the other hand, on a blog there is scrolling. And it is infinite. There are screen dimensions vs website dimensions. There are your resolutions vs their resolutions. And there is a built in attention deficit disorder meter running.

I am probably over thinking it, but all this is part of the craft. If we are to be called photographers, then we are to be called craftsmen I think.