The Art of Random Photo Pairing

King Penguin, South Georgia.

When I came back from my second trip to Antarctica in March of 2004, I had some 75 rolls of Fuji Velvia. At 36-exposures a roll, that meant 2700 slides to deal with. At the time, it felt like a lot of photos.

Fast forward a couple of years and it isn’t unusual for me to produce 100′s of photos in just one morning. The last three days I was out shooting, I produced an average of 300 photos over a four hour period.

While there is no doubt my shooting has improved over the last 5-years, I have also been shooting a lot more things. The end result is a LOT of photos to import, edit and catalog each year.

Recently I have been spending some time going through my catalog and I inevitably come across random photos that are strong, but are not necessarily part of any one body of work.

I remember seeing a great series on photo pairing by Damon Winter over at the NY Times site. Influenced by that, I started looking again at these random photos and ways in which they could be paired. The photos above and below are just two examples of what I am talking about.

Ice and snow, Antarctica.

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