Taking a safari through your own images

- One of the great advantages of shooting digitally is that you can review your images so quickly. You can, of course look at them on the back of the camera, but more importantly, you can run right home, stick them on your computer, and start seeing the day's work. There's a downside to that, at least in my experience. Which is looking at your images right away can make you a little hyper critical. And I think it's a combination of a couple of things. One, it's you remember really what the scene looked like when you were there, but more than that, it's if you're out and you feel like you've taken a couple of images that are going to be really good, your expectations are high, and so when you get home you can maybe be a little disappointed.

When I can, and I do this a lot just when I'm shooting at home, I will actually not look at my images right when I get home. I'll just copy them over and leave them there and come back later. Other images, I'm eager to look at them right away. In either case, I have found that going back to images months or years later, I can sometimes find some jewels that I missed the first time either because I was being too critical or I was in a hurry or just my taste has changed. I want to show you an example of that right now.

I was in Scotland about a year ago and I took a bunch of pictures and I found what I thought were the good ones. So I'm going to go back through this now, I haven't looked at these in months. And see if I missed anything. In my head I don't remember that as being a particularly great photographic trip. I was there with my parents doing a long trek across... Not across, along Loch Ness. And I remember it being a fun trip, but I don't remember getting a lot photographically. So I've always thought of that as kind of a lesser photographic excursion.

So I'm interested to see what I might have missed the first time. Mostly this was a case of shooting a lot of trees. That's a perfectly fine image. It was a lot of repetitive days. So a lot of this kind of stuff. And I'm just looking here. And of course this was a vacation so I've also got just straight documentation in here. I'm going to just go pretty quickly through these. And in addition to being an exercise in trying to find things that you may have missed before, it's also a good...

It's interesting the ones that are catching my eye, like this one just caught my eye, but when I look down here at the bottom of the screen, I see it's got two stars on it. So this was already a select, I caught this one the first time. What I was about to say is this is a good exercise in kind of following your impulses. I'm just going to look at these really quick and see if there are things that catch my eye for any reason. This is obviously part of panorama, and there it is. The ones that are in black and white are plainly things that I have already taken note of and processed.

Huh. Okay, this image. I don't have any others of this scene. I think there's something here. In that I didn't see before. I'm going to go into the develop module here in light room and play with things a little bit. What I'm finding is, I believe, I kind of know what I was thinking when I shot this image, which is there's this great light on this tree. And this wonderful shadow behind it. It would be nice to play that up.

And if we did, maybe we could get somewhere with this image. So I'm going to see what happens if I really crush the blacks down to darken that background. I want to be sure that I don't sacrifice any of the nice light in the foreground so I'm going to move some tones into the middle on the histogram up there. To just get the image brighter overall. When I do that, I'm really brightening up that background. So I don't think I'm going to be able to attack this with global edits. So I'm going to go in here with my radial adjustment tool.

And attack some of these things separately. I put a radial adjustment on that branch. I'm just gonna...oops, I need to invert this. Invert mask. Now I'm editing only what's inside that circle. So I can really try to... There we go. Pull this stuff down. Again, my hope here is that I can create more separation between the tree and the background than I was getting in my original shoot.

That's working pretty well. I'm going to just, before that, I'm just going to copy, or I'm sorry create another radial adjustment here. And do this side also. Tell it to invert the mask. Pull this down. Oh let's completely get rid of that. I'm going to need to refine these later to work out the brightness over here, but this at least gives me an idea that I think there's a shot here.

ActuaLly I kind of like those being bright on the tips there. They're coming out of the gloom and into the light. Same with this branch over here. Maybe through a vignette on this. And I'd really be getting somewhere. Yeah, there's an image to be had here. This is a nice looking tree. I think it probably needs to be brighter along here. That might be some localized adjustments. I like the color, I like this gradient coming down the tree. So that's a keeper. I'm going to give that two stars and I'm going to label it. Because this is one that I'm not going to easily find.

I just put a yellow label on that so I can easily go back later to rework these. And I will keep going. This might be another thing like the image we just saw. I might be able to push the background there down a little, bring this out in front. I'll give that a yellow label. Not ready to commit to giving that a rating yet. Here, I like this shadow, I like this highlight. And that could be made more dramatic, turned into a black and white image. I wish she was... Honestly, I wish she was more interesting.

She's just standing there looking inside. I wish she was either facing me or doing something. But still maybe there's something there, I'll give that. I've got a lot of things that I think are almost something or would be a good background for something. Ooh this could be interesting. Look at the contrast in here, these trunks versus the sky and some other stuff. There might be something there I could do. So... Trees, castles, large water features, this is basically what walking around Scotland is.

And again, I'm not worrying about images that were documenting my trip. That's a whole separate thing. I'm just looking for nice, fine art style images that maybe I can do something with. These are nice clouds, but I just don't feel like there's any real composition here that can be saved. So, it's turning out that my first trip through here was pretty accurate. There's... Not much there, okay wait a minute, look at the... Ooh, alright I like these. Just straight geometry play. You can see me working it.

So here's the first image. That's pretty nice, it doesn't work wider. It does work simplified and going in a little more telephoto. So let's see if we can just punch this up a little bit. Put the whites where they need to be with the white slider. Drag the highlights back down to give us some more contrast in those whites. Maybe even pull the exposure up a little bit to get better brightness overall. Now it means we need to pull the whites back down.

I like the simplicity of this. I like the tones, I will keep this color. This is, I'm actually going to give that three. Put a yellow thing on it cause I want to remind myself to go back later Normally my process would not be to put the color label on there. It's just since I'm going through these quickly, normally I would edit this all the way to completion, but I don't want to bore you with all that. So that's why I'm tagging these yellow. I can go back now and redo them. This looks like such an old building. This is a church I believe. This old building, but it's got this power line or light pole or something on it. I'm not going to take that out.

You might go, oh that's kind of a weird anachronism or what not but it is the reality of this place. I like it there. So this only needs tonal adjustment. So where am I at? I've found like three images here. That's got two stars on it. I was about to say well that might be something, but I've already denoted that as something. Sun was setting kind of nicely, but... I kept being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That one's been tagged.

Some of these that have been tagged two stars are catching my eye. I'm looking down, seeing they have two stars. I gave them two originally because I didn't think that there was anything there. Now going back, I'm thinking if I worked them some more, maybe I could find something. And here we are the last three and that's it. I didn't find a ton, but I found a couple of images that I think will be really nice and maybe a third that could be something. And I didn't have to go out and do anymore shooting. I can just do this at home when it's raining. Or when I don't feel like going out shooting. And that's just one folder full of images here.

I've got bunches of those. So in addition to this being something you can do after the fact as a check against your own editor, this is also a reason why you really shouldn't delete a lot when you are making your first assessment of your images. Obviously if you've got your hand in front of the camera or it's out of focus or what not, you can throw those out. But ones that you're not sure of, definitely don't delete those because your opinion of them may change later. Your taste may change later or you might even find sometimes that you were just beginning to break through to something else.

You were experimenting and you didn't know it and months later you maybe had pushed that a little further and now when you go back you'll realize oh this is where I first started to compose this way or see this thing or see that thing. So kind of taking a safari through things that you've already shot can be a good way of finding images that you didn't know where there before, learning about your own process, seeing how your eye has developed, and letting you apply things that you've learned since then to situations where you've already shot.