Editing & Sequencing
Welcome to the April 2025 Newsletter where we do some editing and go the dentist with Matty Healy
This month I want to talk about editing and sequencing. But first, The 1975 & the dentist (a really crap band name!). I love The 1975 and their latest live album ‘Live From The AO Arena, Manchester, 17.02.24’ is outstanding. Anyway, I was at the dentist, which I hate, he was doing the teeth cleaning with that supersonic high pitched evil dark-side-of-the-force cleaner thing, my least favourite sound in the world. But my dentist is pretty cool and says to me ‘put your headphones on, play really loud music that makes you happy’ and it kinda works, especially with great live albums because it takes me away, into a music venue, into a happy place and almost makes me forget I am paying a dentist to do this to me.
Anyway, always bring headphones! - that is my recommendation…for everything in life really!
Editing
This months theme is editing & sequencing - inspired by my good friend Daniel Milnor who recently published The Edit on his site, which you should read first. It is also a fascinating insight into Daniel’s early days as a photographer and the benefit of having a great Editor look at your work. And that’s the thing, very few of us working today work for any kind of trained photo editor. I work fulltime as a concert and event photographer and none of my clients have a photo editor. Actually for some of my clients, I am the photo editor! Just to be clear, I don’t mean edit as in post-processing, I mean editing your selection of images that you send/submit/put in a portfolio etc.
So you have to be your own Editor, and I honestly feel this is the best way to improve. Do you spend time looking back at your work, do you analyse what went well what could be better after every shoot? If you don’t critically look back at your back, I doubt you will improve much because how would you know what needs improving? Make photo essays, print your work, make magazines. Yes it takes a lot more effort than a quick SoMe post, but it takes effort to learn this. It took me ages to learn decent editing and sequencing, Dan Milnor was one of the people I learned from at a Peru Workshop way back in 2012. This, learning in person, is probably the best, so if you can, do attend a workshop or get a portfolio/story review from an experienced photographer, even better if it is someone you know and trust.
I often manage photo teams at festivals/large Arena shows so by now I have a fair amount of experience of being the Photo Editor&Manager (you have to imagine me as J. Jonah Jameson from Spiderman, played by J.K. Simmons, that is me when I’m the Photo Boss!).
Most photographers are not used to culling the work, so when I tell them ‘give me your 20 best’ and they send me 100 and tell me to pick my favourites. No, it’s your favourites to choose - and this is a power! Don’t give me 4 almost identical close-ups, give me your 1 favourite (I realise it can be different with studio shoots) Your choice, you decide, you have the power! And don’t ever give me (or anyone really) anything where your feeling is ‘oh I hope they do not pick this one’. Only ever send things that you love. Let’s say a band is choosing from your selection, they could choose any picture, you don’t know, anything in that selection could be their favourite, so don’t add anything that you are not ok with being someone else’s #1. Every picture delivered has to be a picture you’d be ok to be chosen as a ‘cover’ picture. It is ok that you send me 50 pictures if there really was 50 awesome ‘moments’ in the concert, but they all have to stand on their own. Every time I click ‘next’ I want to see something new, not 3 almost identical pictures from the same angle.
I have a Music Magazine on my site with over a hundred photo essays from concerts. I don’t really care that no one sees them, I am making these for me. Ideally I would be printing most of these essays, but yeah, it’s cheaper to make them on my site. Sometimes I make them into Blurb Magazines but let’s talk about that next month. The primary function of these essays is to force myself to look at a body of work, and sequence a story from it. It’s not ‘mercilessly’ edited because it’s my bloody website and not someone’s newspaper so I don’t need to cull it to 10 pictures. I can have 50 if I want, as long as those 50 tell a story and there are no fillers, every picture is it’s own story.
I will use Collections in Lightroom to build a collection for a story. In this example, it is my latest essay on Zar Paulo and the epic 2024. In a Collection, unlike Folders, you can change the order, so you can just start to build the story by drag and drop. This is really powerful, you will start to build this ‘movie’ frame by frame and might discover for example ‘oh I have 4 similar close-ups of the singer, I only need the best one’.
I even do this for my Instagram carousels. This makes even less sense because people will look at it for 2 seconds, but I don’t care, again I am making these for me, I don’t care anyone pays attention, it is my chance to analyse, edit, sequence my work and I treat every media where my work appears with the same attitude. I don’t care what others think, it has to live up to my own standard and things can always be improved.
This is such a huge subject I will continue next month, but for now I leave you with this - practice editing and sequencing your work and try and get feedback on it from experienced photographers that you trust!
(Not from me, sorry, I have to admit, I get a lot of requests for feedback on IG and it’s too much, I have to say no to everyone, I limit it to friends, people I know in real life).
Gigs in March
March was busy, which was quite awesome. I also hit a stream of absolutely gorgeous concerts, with had a theatrical feel to them - which I really like. When you think about it, the setup of a stage at one end of the room, a few podiums, loads of microphone stands and a band is really old now so it’s great when people do something different.
I got to work for American artist Sharon Van Etten on the Copenhagen leg of their Europe tour and this was a fantastic evening, outstanding concert, great light and Sharon, band and crew were so welcoming and wonderful.
Danish pop artist Asbjørn’s live shows are incredible, it’s his fantastic music coupled with dancing and body performance and audience interaction and it’s a show like no other, such a thrill to document:
Danish sample based producer and composer duo Den Sorte Skole performed a visual masterpiece live version of their latest album sandwiched in between 2 screens, one behind them and one large semi-transparent screen close to the audience. On the screens were part documentary movie, part concert movie, part art movie, part visuals, all adding up to proper magic.
FUJIFILM Nordic IG/YT reel
I am a camera ambassador for FUJIFILM and in February the great people at FUJIFILM Nordic asked me to make a 60 second ‘reel’ about the new XF16-55mm II lens. Fortunately, I get a budget for a project like that so I could hire my good friend Mark Balstrup, one of Denmark’s best videographers/editors! To be honest it has been a few years since I’ve been filmed for anything so I was a bit nervous and apprehensive about this, I don’t naturally like to stand in front of the camera and it is hard not to think of this going on the big scary internet. Mark was directing me as we filmed this and came up with all the fun camera angles etc, and I rehearsed the script so I knew it and could rattle it off take after take. That would be my advice to anyone doing this: write a good script, rehearse it, and then hire some awesome people to do directing, filming, editing! I am pleased with the result and fortunately so is FUJIFILM.
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Thank you for reading, feel free to share this with anyone, and comment or send me suggestions and questions. See you next month!
Very interesting post again. I’m still struggling with telling a story with photography. With a movie, it’s easy, the story is quite obvious. Same with a novel. How would you describe or explain “how to tell a story” in photography? For example, your collection you shared in this post, how would you describe the story.