How he organizes his photos

His photos are arranged in collections based on years. Within those years are subfolders of months (01-12). That's it. No days.

4-5 hours of editing 10,000 images

Culling

1. Go through photos, mark them as interesting and put them in a General folder. No categories etc. The General folder is set as a target collection. When you go through photos, anything that is mildly interesting, you hit B and this puts the photo into the General folder. Be liberal in this first pass.
2. Go through the target collection a couple of times, then move to another target collection: Cull #1. This cull is about looking at the details of each photograph, the light, the patterns. You delete what you know you will never use. You identify what photos are worth spending time at.
3. After this, there will be two more steps of edits, deeper that will happen in an iPad. At this point, CM doesn't touch contrast.

Doing this process for photos taken in a long period of time would show where your photographic style changed.

How his photographic style changed

For CM, his photographic style changed in 2018 after his first Vipassana retreat and after he did his first 10-day solo walk. Solitude is a non-negotiable for him when he wants to take good photos.

In 2016, CM started to move away from nature photography he was doing before into building and texture.

CM thought what if we shoot domestic life like laundry and start to ignore the cliches of oriental shrines.

Photo editing for books

For his book project, he looked for 100 images he is excited about and cull that into a max of 60.

The next step is how these images you've chosen align with the narrative you are writing.

For a book about place, you will need a photo that shows a bird's eye-view of the entire space.

You don't want to create a book with photos that are in lots of other books.

Techniques

CM duplicates photos and does tons of edits on them. CMD + apostrophe.

When you pull down the highlights too much, photo goes to HDR mode.

Reduce noise by lessening luminance and adding clarity.

4:5 portrait is so much better than 2:3 for portrait.

Autofocus sometimes feels like you are losing control especially with slow photography.

Shoot underexposed because it gives you more freedom in editing.

CM is fond of decreasing the highlights liberally to -100

Do not overly obsess on framing. You want to have good framing because a lot is unsalvageable but that's it.

Unsorted highlights

Synology

It's so easy in photography to get lost in technical goofery without actually producing work.

Doing long walks, and doing those long walks a couple of times would show you patterns of humanity in display.

Some images by themselves won't work. But when taking together in a sequence, they will work.

When you really like an image, shoot both landscape and portrait so you have a choice for layout.

Culling through photos is like watching a movie with no narrative and making decisions every 10 seconds on whether or not you like the frame in the movie.

References

Craig Mod. (2021, August 2). A Most Boring Livestream—Photo editing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I42cEH5yblg