9 again when required. learn to listen to the criticism of others? Presenting and Assessing Your Work The final stage of photography is to present your results in the most effective way possible. If you made your own prints, either digitally or traditionally, they must be dried and finished, but even if you have received work back from a processing and printing lab, several decisions still have to be made before proceeding to the presentation stage. Shots need to be edited down to your very best, cropped to the strongest composition, and then framed as individual pictures or laid out as a sequence in an album or wall display. Slides can similarly be edited and prepared for projection either traditionally or viewed as a digital slide show on a computer or television screen. At the same time, negatives, slides, contact prints and digital files deserve protective storage and a good filing system, so that you can locate them Now you have the opportunity to review what has been achieved and assess your progress in picture making since starting photography. But how should you criticize the work . . . and also Finishing off Final cropping T his is the final stage in deciding how each picture should be cropped. What began as the original framing up of a subject in the viewfinder concludes here by your deciding whether any last trims will strengthen the composition further. Don't allow the height-to-width proportions of photographic or printing paper to dictate results. Standard size enlargements from a processing lab, for example, show the full content of each negative ­ and however careful you were in the original framing, Figure 9.1 Using L-shaped cards to individual pictures are often improved decide trim. by cropping to a squarer or a more rectangular shape. The same is true for the original capture formats of digital cameras. Often these can be switched in camera from standard 3:2 or 4:3 to widescreen 16:9. Alternatively the cropping can be carried out in your image editing software. When working with printed reulsts placing L-shaped cards on the print surface (Figure 9.1) is the best way to preview any such trim. Then, put a tiny pencil dot into each new corner to guide you in either cropping the print itself before mounting, or preparing a Figure 9.2 Print taped along one edge to card and covered by a cut-out window mat. `window mat' cut-out the correct size to lay on top (see Figure 9.2). 276