It has been pointed out to me over the years and by several people that I have zero fashion sense, particularly in my choice of clothing. Maureen compassionately laughed at me when I dressed up one time in khaki pants and a tan shirt that didn't match and then another time when they did and I looked like the ice cream man. Such lessons taught me a lot about depth of field in my photography.

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Last weekend, more or less just for fun, I reviewed all 180 projects in my Kokoro series of PDFs. One of the conclusions from this review is that I need to do more ruthless editing. Far too often I felt that a project simply had too many images. My primary criteria for editing has always been to eliminate repetition, but I need to expand that and maybe set more rigid limits on how many images are included in a project. Breaking a project into smaller parts might be the key, like chapters in novels.

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LW1499 - The Most Important Lesson

I was recently asked, by two different people, about my 50+ years in photography. A non-photographer asked me what I had learned from my lifelong engagement with photography. Coincidentally a few days later, a photographer asked me essentially the same question. I was surprised that I had different answers depending on who asked question.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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We try, of course, to do our very best with every image, with every project. We strive for perfection. Do we ever achieve it? Far more often than I care to admit, while looking back at some of my completed work I find little things that I could have so easily corrected, but missed. A misspelled word, unfortunate punctuation, the small distraction poking in from the edge of an image, an inconsistency in layout, an image I now realize needed a little tweak here or there. Not failures, but not perfect. Maybe the final step in proofing should be a purposeful review of all the little things that can go wrong.

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I love word play almost as much as I love photography. Has it ever occurred to you the double meaning inherent in the word illumination? We search for illuminating light to reveal the shadows. We also search for illumination in the sense of enlightenment and understanding. Photography is all about illumination, interestingly enough in both definitions of the term. Perhaps better than the term photographer we could think of ourselves as "illumination seekers" — in both senses of the word. Enlightenment, indeed.

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The earliest issues of Kokoro were produced in a portrait orientation. My thinking was that the portrait orientation format would fit better when viewing on a phone or a tablet. I discovered, however, that a portrait orientation did not fit computer monitors, or laptops well at all. I knew that by changing to a landscape orientation would complicate people viewing on their the phone, but phones and tablets can easily be rotated whereas computer monitors and laptops cannot. The aspect ratio for publication gets even trickier in book design. Does this mean we should standardize our aspect ratio based on the final means of production?

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I learned about warm-toning in the mid-1980s. At that time, everybody created selenium-toned images that had a slight purple cast. Contrary to the popular zeitgeist of the times, I discovered Kodak Brown Toner and Kodak Polytoner and fell in love with warm-toned images. In the digital workflow, warm toning is very tricky because brown is such an odd color.

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My approach to processing is that with every image, the end point of processing is unknown. Aesthetics can evolve, ideas can blossom, expectations can change. Perhaps counterintuitively, I find that beginning the process at the same starting point is a surprisingly useful strategy. With every image I start with input sharpening, some tone mapping to make the image look normal, and even some cropping to straighten horizon lines or verticals. Essentially, I start with a normal looking image a straight photograph, without visible processing. That common launching point provides a solid foundation for exploring more exotic processing.

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