Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
Scott Van Osdol is an Austin-based photographer who primarily focuses on lifestyle, agriculture, industrial, and reportage. He came to Wonderful Machine a few months back looking to join our roster of talented photographers. While Scott was showing some strong work at the time, his edit needed a little tweaking. Luckily we had just as much faith in Scott as he did in our work, and both parties agreed to move forward with a web edit in order to get Scott up to speed for membership.
For many photographers, and especially with Scott, a well-considered web edit is often all that’s needed in order to boost their commercial viability and get both feet in the door.
The first thing we focused on for Scott’s edit was to flag all of the strongest and most commercially viable work to separate it from the work that was bringing it down. We then placed that work into appropriate categories and projects. In Scott’s previous edit, he had two separate rodeo galleries which ended up feeling a bit repetitive. For the new edit, we consolidated both galleries into a single “Ropes and Rodeo” gallery that highlights the key aspects of western lifestyle in a manner that’s more descriptive and engaging.
Next, we took a look at some of the project galleries Scott was showing to see if it still made sense to include these somewhat random personal projects with newer projects for brands like Yeti that were just about to be released. Luckily Scott completely understood the importance of letting go of some of this work in order to put emphasis on what he wants to be doing moving forward. His new edit would be geared towards showing off tailored project galleries with an emphasis on lifestyle, industrial, agriculture, and brand narrative. Scott kept one of his personal projects, “Last of Our Lads,” on the site as well.
While working on Scott’s edit, we voiced our concerns about how his current web template was set to auto-fill the images to the frame. Rather than have his work arbitrarily cropped to fill the screen size, we suggested he look into a different template that will show the images in their original format. This also meant an upgrade in how the thumbnails were to be displayed too.
Another thing we noticed while working on Scott’s edit was just how strong his agriculture work was! In his original edit, he had a group of agriculture images from a Bastrop Cattle Co. project mixed into his industrial gallery that felt underemphasized and out of place. When we took all of this agriculture work and started building its own project gallery, it became clear from the quality of the work that Scott would have a great new specialty to market on his site. After sending him the edit, he actually went out the next day to shoot supplemental content for the project. Those extra shots solidified the gallery and gave a major boost to his brand.
After Scott implemented the edit on his site, he was kind enough to share his thoughts about the editing process:
Editing our own images is difficult. Some of our favorite images are based on invisible “backstories,” narratives known only to ourselves. That’s where a good editor comes in—they view our images impartially, without knowing the back story. Stacy changed what was a rambling, story-telling site into a lean, mean, selling-machine. Given that the average visitor looked at only four to six images per gallery before moving on, this approach made sense: lead with the strongest images and make the case for hiring me quickly.
Check out the full before and after screencast below: