On winter days like today, where it’s freezing cold and there’s gray overcast skies, it’s generally not a great time to go out and shoot outside. If you have an opportunity to go out and find some great interior spaces to shoot (or you are lucky enough to live in a place that is having good weather), then that’s wonderful. However, on days when you can’t or just don’t feel like going out to shoot, here’s a project that can be very rewarding for you if you’ve been shooting for sometime.
I’m talking about revisiting photos you’ve taken months or even years later and creating new art with those images. On the next page I’ll get into exactly what I’m talking about with this project, but first….
Keep Everything
When people ask what I do with all my images, I tell them: I keep everything. Well, everything that isn’t complete and utter garbage. If it’s exposed properly and relatively sharp (or the blur is ok looking if it’s a shot with intentional blur), I keep it. Even if the composition and such doesn’t strike me as worthwhile when I first process the pictures.
It’s important to organize the pictures properly, so it’s easy to revist the pictures at a later date, but that’s easy enough. Find a system and keep them organized. I use Lightroom, and I organize by year, then subject, and then finally a folder for the date of the photo. Lightroom makes this easy, but there are plenty of programs to use. Lightroom is also a wonderful RAW converter and photo editor, as is Aperutre for the Mac. If you don’t want to shell out the money for these programs, however, you can get decent photo organization through a program like Picasa, which is free to download.
So…why keep everything? Well, first of all, storage isn’t that expensive. I have over 150,000 photos from the past 11 years, and they take up about 1.3 TB of data. That’s a lot of data, but a 2TB hard drive cost me about $90 last year. Right now hard drive prices have gone up quite a bit due to flooding in Asia, but even at current prices, it works out to about 6 hundredths of a cent per photo to store.
Second, your eye as a photographer is sometimes keener than you know at the time. What I mean by that is, if you revisit a shoot after 6 months, then again after two years, and again after 5 years, you will likely find new images each time that you find interesting or have potential. I’ve ‘found’ new images I’ve taken 7 years after the fact…and it’s a joy. You never know what possibilities are out there with these images…you don’t want to throw away great images because of an oversight.
Next: Take a Look Back….
Good idea. If for any other reason, it’s just nice to go back and remember the moments I’ve captured!
I have undertaken what you suggest in this post in the past and agree it can be very rewarding, in terms of discovering “new” opportunities for expressing creativity, “saving” old images with new technologies and re-visualizing old experiences. (In my case, it was Paris and the images were from a trip 40 tears ago – slides scanned originally solely for preservation purposes.)Thanks for the timely reminder (as I stare out at the coating of snow weighing down the pine branches outside my window.)
Jordan,
I do the same thing, revisit old photos now and then, for whatever reason, bad weather outside, new post processing software, remembering a place, etc.
I call it “mining my hard disk”
From one EE to another, thanks for your down to earth and highly practical reviews.