Photo Editing...

I read a great Q and A this morning on Canon Professional Network with Mary Anne Golon the director of photography at Time magazine. If you are interested in the whole article it is here. Here are a couple of the parts I found most revealing.

So a lot of that editing process has shifted to the photographer?

Yes. And I think a lot of photographers are very pleased about that because before they didn't have any reasonable level of control over their work. They'd just send in the unprocessed film and then it would be, "Oh my God, why do they always pick the wrong picture?". How many times have we heard that! But it's also created a much bigger workload for the photographers and I think it's almost been crushing for them. With the new technology they're not only photographers but they've had to become editors and technology specialists too. What I think they should be focusing on is what they've always focused on – taking great pictures.

How do you feel about the trend towards more 'celebrity-style portraiture', often at the expense of traditional photojournalism?

One of the things that's really hard to make interesting is business editorial. So if it can help you to bring to life concepts and ideas for those readers, then great. Fortune and the whole financial magazine group here have done a really good job with that. For Time it's been a great departure for us to start doing many of our portraits of world leaders and political figures in that stylised fashion. I think it's just been a response to a weariness with conventional political coverage which has tended to be controlled photo opportunities and set scenes.