You Can Bring the Past to Life in the New Year

At least with old photos…

I know it is a new year and everyone is “looking forward” etc. But sometimes you can look to your past in order to move forward. Such is the case with this photo. I took this photo in September of 2015 and it was very much a “throw away” shot, at the time. I was looking through my old catalogue in Adobe Lightroom from this trip after updating the Lightroom program, and this shot caught my eye.

I could see the photo differently now. The way I see a photograph now, at least in terms of the final development, is vastly different than it was nearly five years ago. When I first started to get good at taking photographs I would always have the end product (meaning how I intended to use post-processing programs) in mind when composing the shot. At the time I was primarily using Lightroom to process my RAW images. I only dabbled in Photoshop. Now, in 2020, Photoshop is involved in the development process on nearly every image I share (or work on).

Long story for another time made short, from the very start, I always shot RAW, never .jpg. So I always had to use software to develop the shots I’d take. The above photo was technically perfect from a gear, camera setting, and compositional standpoint but I abandoned it back in 2015 because I did not have the skill set to bring it to life. Or I needed more than just Lightroom. Now, five years later, this could well be one of my top shots of 2015, I just didn’t know it. Or, it just required me to become a more complete artist to realize its beauty.

Point is, not everything in your past is totally gone. This can apply to far more than a technically sound photo… . There may be something beautiful back there that you may only now realize.