Bonnie Shay professional photo organizer returns to Changing the Rules with a twist. Bonnie and Ray discuss how to deal with those boxes of photos and how to organize them. They discuss how to reverse engineer the photo-taking process by looking at past photo clutter. How do you rethink the picture-taking process to get better photos and less clutter?
Bonnie's Website: www.MariposaPhotoOrganizing.com
Bonnie's YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMjKpUeiB-o&t=1797s
Transcription:
Intro 00:03
Welcome to Changing the Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives and advice on how you can achieve that too. Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:20
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Changing the Rules. You know, Changing the Rules is about the fact that we're all given too many rules in life. They start with our parents, and then the schools, and then the church. And before we know it, our lives are cluttered with rules. And rules do two things: they tell us what we have to do, and what we can't do. And the next thing we know, we're living other people's lives and not our own. So Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple said, when you're living your life by other people's rules, you're not living your life. And we represent here the luckiest people in the world who run off, design their own lives and live them under their own terms. And we have one of those people with us. Bonnie Shay is a person who I've known for a good number of years. I won't tell you how many because I met her when she was very young. She has a company called Mariposa Photo Organizing, and she does some really unique things with old photos to organize them for people. So Bonnie, say hi to everybody.
Bonnie Shay01:34
Hello, everybody!
Ray Loewe01:35
No. Hi, everybody. See, there you are, you're breaking the rules already! So tell us in a minute or two, what you generally do for people and how you've specialized over the years.
Bonnie Shay01:51
So I have helped my clients with their photo collections, and I've narrowed it down to the printed photo part of their collections because that's what I love doing. I just love tangible photos. And to me, Ray, those photos are at the highest risk of a: being lost or damaged in the natural disasters that we unfortunately have or a fire a flood. But also, I feel like the printed photos, since they typically are of older nature, I want to make sure their stories are told before the people behind the stories that know the story, aren't here to tell them. Because I'm all about someone being able to share their photos and leave a legacy with their photos.
Ray Loewe02:36
Cool. Okay, so I'm shutting you up here. So, I actually have a hidden agenda, and I'm gonna get to what I want to get to. But first, when you go get a new client, you're picking up a box of photos.
Bonnie Shay02:55
Well, I'm gonna have to correct you, Ray. It's not a box of photos. It could be 17 boxes of photos, but you're right.
Ray Loewe03:03
Okay, so typically, why do people hire you? They have these boxes of photos, what do they want out of it, where are they going with them?
Bonnie Shay03:13
So when a potential client reaches out, basically, they are overwhelmed with their lifetime of printed photos that are in lots of boxes and albums. And they just haven't looked at them most likely in a long time, because they've been probably hiding around in their whole house in different places. And so my clients are stuck, they don't know what to do, they don't know where to go with their printed photos. In their mind it is like this big mountain of photos, and they don't know how to attack it. It's basically a big mess, and I don't say that in a critical fashion. But if you're a boss, and the boss says they're in various states of disarray or order, and what do we do with them? So I basically come in and lead the clients through what I call my curation process, because we want to make sure this treasure of photos are in a state that are going to be shared, and managed, and fixed from any disaster.
Ray Loewe04:07
Okay, let me interrupt for a minute because I understand safe, you know, you want them to endure, and some of these are fragile. But what I'm really interested in here is what are people trying to do with these photos at the end. Or is it capturing stories? Is it just capturing images? You know, where are they going?
Bonnie Shay04:35
For me, it's all about the story, which is what these people want. It's the photographic story, but we want the text as well. And who is in the photos? Because basically, these clients want to leave this story to their kids and their grandkids. And it's their history. It's their family history, and it brings back memories and discussion topics because it's fun to see these old photos to talk about, oh, what happened back then? Or who was that? Oh my gosh, Mom, I've never seen you when you were 10 years old. That's you at two years old. So it's really good storytime that can be shared when the photos are available.
Ray Loewe05:17
Yeah, I can tell you right now, our engineer Luke is sitting here cringing that somebody would see a photo of him when he was two years old. Right? Okay, so back, you have a process for dealing with this. Take us quickly through the process so people know what you have to do. But then I want to come back and focus on the result and how when we take photos, we can make sure we get the results that we want.
Bonnie Shay05:42
Absolutely. So the basic process is a: you gather all these photos together, b: we want to put them in a general chronological order. And we're not going for perfection, but we like to see our stories played out over time. And then you want to edit them so we get a reasonable amount of photos that we're gonna eventually scan so that we can have them digitally. And I want to emphasize, and I'll probably say this several times during our podcast, Ray, we want to focus on quality, over quantity. Because even if we magically organize 30,000 photos of the printed photos, they're still going to be overwhelming. We want to get the highlights, the best of the best stories, and each photo needs to tell a story. And let me share one quick, or two quick ideas of how people can know what's good, and what's not when you're in the editing phase of looking at your photos. Number one, if you have a picture of the Eiffel Tower, that's the Eiffel Tower. To me, that's not memorable or meaningful, because any of us could go on the internet now and get a picture of the Eiffel Tower. But if you were standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, that makes a story that tells us, oh, you were in Paris.
Ray Loewe06:55
And I'd ruin the picture.
Bonnie Shay06:58
We'll talk about that later, Ray. You didn't break the camera, though so, we're okay. And then number two is we don't have to perfect photos. So when I tell my clients I'm editing your collection without their help, maybe because they're not able to help me, and I see a picture of a three-year-old with a chocolate covered face. Some people would say, well, that's a terrible picture. It's a mess. No, no, no throw it out. And I want to say no because maybe that was the child's first chocolate ice cream cone and there's a story behind that photo that we want to tell and preserve. So, it's all about storytelling in pictures that we want to have our quality, but they don't have to be perfect. And one other thing I want to suggest to people if you're going through your own printed photos, we remove duplicates, we remove redundant photos, we reduce and remove poor quality photos. Like if it's blurry or fuzzy. And we have better pictures than the blurry, fuzzy version. So it's all about editing. And then the end result is we end up with a much smaller quantity of photos. But we have meaningful stories, photos that can tell your story. And my clients are thrilled and relieved when we have a curated collection. And they don't have these boxes and boxes and boxes.
Ray Loewe08:19
Yeah, and sometimes people don't even know who the people were in these photos. So some of your job is trying to identify people. Trying to track them down and trying to put together the stories. Sometimes after the people that are involved aren't here anymore. Good luck.
Bonnie Shay08:39
Right. And Ray, this time, what I'm trying to help my clients avoid is getting to the place where they don't know who's in them.
Ray Loewe08:46
All right, so here's where I want to go. And we can come back to your processing techniques, and I can attest the fact that you do wonderful things for people who get to the state in life where they're trying to find meaning in their past and have a mess on their hands. So, what I want to do is we're coming out of this COVID thing now and I'm starting to think again about traveling. I'm starting to get my camera out and clean it it up a little bit and make sure I have all the cards and the lenses and that they all work and all of that stuff. And one of the things that I've realized in the past is that I love being out taking pictures. I don't love so much sitting at home in front of my computer and processing the bad photos that I took. And I also have had a change in thought of where I'm going. My past was to go to the jungle in Africa, or the Galapagos Islands and capture these portraits of animals that were unique and different, that I could hang on the wall. Now, in a sense, that's a story. But, what I'm more interested in now is taking a trip and saying, okay, tell me in six photos, what this trip was all about. So what I want to do to you here and I do mean do to you is because I want you to rethink and reposition yourself. If you're on the other side of the lens, and I know you have experience here, because you grew up in a family of photographers, we won't go there right now. But tell me how to rethink. I'm planning a trip. So how do I spend less time in post-processing? How do I get the photos I really want? How do I think through what the stories are going to be? So that if I went to you afterward, you'd look at me, laugh at me, and say it's done. So impart your wisdom. Go ahead. You have 14 seconds.
Bonnie Shay11:10
Exactly right. So, a few thoughts I want to share with you and with your listeners is that being overwhelmed with too many photos is not a comfortable position, whether they were printed or digital. So once again, I want to say quality over quantity. So we're not about shooting off 30 photos of the same thing. We want to be careful, so overwhelm is what we want to avoid. Also, I want to help you prevent the clutter before it happens. So that's why we're going through this whole process, that you won't get home at the end of the trip and have 10,000 pictures. And then I want to give you credit Ray, because when we were doing our pre-plan call on this, you said, let's call this photo organizing in reverse. Like we're planning ahead, so you don't have this mess at the end of a trip, which, to me having a plan is the best place to be in life in general. And if you can practice that plan repeatedly, you'll get even better at it. So let's talk about my thoughts about planning ahead for a trip, and how you're going to get this photo essay. So in my mind, think about who is your audience? Are you your audience? Or your spouse or your kids? Or grandkids? Who would be your audience that would enjoy this photo essay? And where am I going, you know, maybe you're just going down the street, or maybe you're going to Morocco or Africa. And you could do some research on where you're going so you can get a sense of what you might see. So you're not just surprised when you get off the plane. And you've got to stop number one, it's like, oh, I didn't know I was gonna see this kind of place, you could do some pre-planning. So another concept is to keep in mind what photos not to take. So I already mentioned the Eiffel Tower idea, right? But keep that in mind. Because if you get home with 20 pictures of the Eiffel Tower with nobody in front of them, that was a waste of your time and storage space. So think about what photos you want to be careful of not taking. General scenery is basically what you don't want to take except a few environmental pictures because you want to remember where you were or what city. So if you need to take a picture of something that reminds you where you were if you're on a 10-day cruise, that's helpful. But a specific thing that I think is also helpful if you want to keep up to date with your photos as you're taking them. So let's say you're going on a 10-day cruise. How about at the end of each day, before you go to sleep at night, you go through the photos you took that day and do some light editing. Let go of stuff that's obviously garbage or redundant, or it didn't come out the way you wanted it to. But once again, you're helping yourself get home at the end of the 10 days and not have the 10,000 photos. You've curated them along the way. And I already said this, but practice makes perfect. So by editing each day, you're getting a better flow and a better sense of what you're getting and what you want at the end of the day.
Ray Loewe14:32
Okay, so I've been thinking, this is trouble. So one of the things that I found is that if I'm going to a city that I've never been to, there are websites available of photographers who have taken pictures in the city, and I found some of them are pretty interesting because they can show you where to stand to get the best picture. Or where to capture the best light to highlight something. So if I want a picture of the Eiffel Tower that I'm going to consider a fine art picture, I'm going to hang it on my wall, and I want to make it mine, the perspective of it needs to change. And so otherwise I could go by the picture of the Eiffel Tower. That's what you're telling me? Right? I think I think the second thing is, you really have to think about whether or not it's something you want to hang on the wall, or whether it's something that you just want to put down in front of somebody and tell a story. Now, remember going over to people's houses that have just gotten back from a trip and you see 47 million slide photos of ugly pictures of ugly people. So again, you're saying you avoid this by just cropping every day, get rid of the especially the blurred images and the stuff that's there, get rid of it, focus on the quality? Focus on what are you going to do? Are you trying to tell the story of trying to hang something on the wall? Any other things that you can think of?
Bonnie Shay16:12
Yeah, so let's say you're having a family trip, and you're taking grandkids and kids and relatives and siblings. You're going on maybe a family reunion. And so you might want to do some post pictures because you want to get a whole group shot. I also want to give people the concept that when I'm going through my client's photos, the post stuff is not as interesting as the candid photos. Yes, posed, you are getting the people you know but there's not much emotion with somebody looking at the photographer straight in the eye and smiling when he says they cheese. So think about candid photos, it sort of is in line with your idea of maybe a picture of the Eiffel Tower, but do something different about it like an angle or take it when it's sunrise or sunset. It's not just the perfect Eiffel tower that everybody else has seen. But candid versus posed is a great differentiating factor and what you're going to get quality with. My other suggestion is for those of your listeners who have printed collections, and maybe they haven't worked on them, but you are planning a trip in the near future that you want to go and take your phone, your digital camera, I would say a good little homework assignment for practice is to go through your printed photos just lightly. Don't try to curate them right there. But look at them and see what kind of pictures generate emotions, especially pictures from your past, the story that you're loving to see in your photos, and that might just give you some good insights, and some good emotions that you can take towards the future of taking your own photos and making these valuable and meaningful photo essays.
Ray Loewe17:58
Cool. Okay, I think you helped me think through some interesting things. I mean, I'm really excited about getting back in the photography world. I haven't taken any pictures the last two years. And I think you're absolutely right, think of the pictures that have meaning. Think about how you want to pose them. Do a little homework. Think like a photo organizer in reverse. Right? All right, so Bonnie Shay, Mariposa Photo Organizing, we'll put her website up on our notes later. If you have these boxes of photos, Bonnie is a great photo detective, she can feel the paper that it was taken on and know when that picture was taken, she can find a face in that photo and then find those faces in other photos. And, Bonnie, thank you. I know I put you on the spot because this isn't what you do. But I think it will help us a lot to think about what we're taking before we get to that stage where the memories are made. So any final comments from you before we bail out here?
Bonnie Shay19:10
No, what I'll say is I'll also give you a link to a YouTube video that I was part of that people if they want to know more about printed photos and need a little more instruction. I'm happy to share that you can just go on and see. You know, I talked about the process in more detail, which, as we already talked about digital, but the curating a printed collection and digital collections are parallel processes. They're just different formats. But I think it could help people in general as well.
Ray Loewe19:38
Sure. So send me that link. We'll post it on our podcast and thank you for being with us. And Bonnie Shay, Mariposa Photo Organizing, you know that Mariposa is too long a word. I understand it's a butterfly. Okay, and you're a flighty person. But other than that, have a wonderful day, and Luke, sign us off, please.
Outro 20:02
Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest, and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.