Making the pictures is maybe half of a series. The other half is deciding which ones belong, in what order, and what the order says. I find this part harder than the shooting, and for a long time I did it badly: on a screen, in a grid, with everything at the same size and all of it visible at once.

What follows is how I do it now. It is slow and a little old-fashioned, and it works better for me than anything else I have tried.

Step one: a rough cut on screen

I start with everything from the project in one folder and go through it quickly, marking anything that makes me stop. No second-guessing, no comparing. For Night Traffic, about six hundred frames became ninety in an evening.

Then I go through the ninety more slowly and remove near-duplicates, keeping the stronger of each pair. This usually halves the number again.

Step two: small prints

Forty or so frames get printed small — about the size of a postcard — on cheap paper. This is the most useful step in the whole process. On paper, pictures that looked fine on the screen sometimes look thin, and pictures I had nearly removed sometimes look much stronger. Print also forces a decision about each frame’s brightness and colour, which the screen lets me postpone.

Long exposure at night: streams of red tail-lights and pale headlights drawn into smooth, curving lines across a dark valley.
One of the frames that only earned its place once it was printed. Night Traffic, No. 05

Step three: the table

The prints go on a long table, or the floor, in no particular order. I leave them there for a few days and walk past them. Pictures that keep catching my eye stay. Pictures I forget about go into a pile at the side — not discarded, just moved.

Then I start making pairs. A series reads two pictures at a time: each frame is seen next to the one before it and the one after. I look for pairs that do something together — a shape repeated, a colour carried over, a change in scale. Pairs that do nothing are usually where a sequence goes flat.

A few rules, often broken

  • Open with a picture that explains the territory, not the strongest one.
  • Put the strongest picture about two-thirds through, where attention usually dips.
  • Avoid three similar frames in a row, unless the repetition is the point.
  • End quietly. The last picture should let the viewer leave, not shout.

Night Traffic breaks the second rule: its strongest frame is the second one, because the series needed the trails early or the bokeh pictures made no sense.

Step four: back to the screen

Once I have a sequence on the table, I photograph it with my phone, then rebuild it on the computer at proper size and look at it as a slideshow. This catches problems the table hides — mostly differences in brightness that look fine side by side but jump when one replaces the other.

Step five: leave it alone

The last step is waiting. I leave the sequence for at least two weeks before publishing it here. Every time, I change something on returning: usually one swap, occasionally a whole picture removed. Then I stop. A series could be re-sequenced forever, and at some point it has to go out and do its own work.