Behind the Edit: How We Celebrate
With 6,573 submissions to the How We Celebrate assignment, choosing a final story was not easy for Your Shot Associate Photo Editor Kristen McNicholas. Below are screenshots of images that did not make the final cut with some explanation.
Editing the “How We Celebrate” assignment has been a heart-warming curation for me as someone who loves to celebrate the little and big things in life. I was excited to bring back the Behind the Edit series for the How We Celebrate assignment! It looks a little different than the previous posts because I wanted to take an opportunity to show the nitty gritty side of editing from my view of the grid behind the scenes.
I knew going into this curation that I would have to choose between multiples of a similar event for the final curation which resulted in much of my final editing. During the editing process I started to recognize many birthday and Holi festival images emerging from the submissions.
There were a few photos between both of these celebrations that didn’t make the final cut for the simple reason that the captions weren’t informative. A celebration is more than just the party we see on the surface and per my assignment prompt, captions were crucial. If a scene was visually recognizable, then I was looking for a thoughtful caption to fulfill the narrative which accounts for both of the birthday images I selected for my final curation.
Some editing decisions are painful to make. Editors, myself included, can become attached to images from the beginning and then once the final editing process comes around, it might not check the boxes important to the editor. One image in particular from Holi of the blue man rinsing off in water was big favorite of mine, visually but unfortunately, while this moment is an entirely different view of Holi, the caption didn’t hold up for the final curation. On the other hand, the image by Ankit Sharma, of the man covered in red with arms spread wide, the caption gives me the backstory of Holi, not assuming we know what it is: “The photograph was taken during Holi (the festival of Colors) in March 2017, at Barsana, Mathura (India). It is a tradition where the people of two different villages of Lord Krishna and Goddess Radha play the color festival with joy by singing, dancing and drizzling colors.”
Photographers should always try to give a photo editor as much information as possible (to make hiring you as easy for them as possible). If a photo editor is hiring a photographer for an assignment and one sends no captions and another sends full captions, the photo editor will almost always hire the photographer with captions. Even just a hint of context is better than a single word caption or no caption at all.
In closing, not all of the final selections for this story have perfect captions or a completely different perspective of a recognizable event but the visual story-telling carries through. Thank you all for taking some time to read this and participating in the assignment. I look forward to more Behind the Edits on future assignments!
Click to see the final How We Celebrate story!
