Revisiting

Life gets busy. As a photographer I am constantly chasing the elusive buck, hustling from gig to gig. No sooner than you have signed off a project, than you are either actively seeking out a new project, or have already been thrown deep end into a new one. This is a constant state of existence for anyone living in today’s ‘gig’ culture. I’m not even going to get started on the nightmare that is image management in this kind of atmosphere of constant hustle, but I am going to discuss how we fly by images and forget about them, before they should be forgotten.  

In particular, while wearing my landscape photographer and tour leader hat, I have the habit of working through only the initial few images from a workshop or trip, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of images to languish in the hard drive, RAW, unseen and unloved. I rush back to the studio and am caught up in the hurly burly of ‘normal’ work where I have to produce imagery for clients. As a result my images, the ones I care about, get forgotten; buried in the day to day of paying the bills. I absolutely love the Scottish saying (at least I think it’s Scottish - something I read in an academic paper years ago arguing that long-term environmental concerns are second to the more immediate concerns of the stomach); ‘You can’t eat a landscape’ (probably more like, ‘Ya canna eat ah lahndscape’. Thus my landscapes get forgotten, put aside to make headspace for bolts, buildings, cars and businesspeople. 

My hard-drives grow fat on the unworked RAWs from multiple places around the world that I truly am blessed and extraordinarily privileged to be able to visit. The piece here is twofold in that this building inventory of unseen images is both a curse and a phenomenal blessing. The curse part is fairly obvious. It’s been intimated in the words above, that the hard drives grow incessantly, but seldom get to share their images. The blessing is that we get to go back into these images, often with a better understanding of the tools at our fingertips. 

I have read before from other photographers that they never go back to an image that they have shot. Once they have finished the image, they move on. There is merit to this, and it’s something that I have said of my own images too. Who has time to go back on images that they have already worked on? It would seem that apparently Ansel Adams had the time. He continued to refine and adapt some of his most iconic images (such as ‘Moonrise, Hernandez’ and ‘Moon and Half Dome’) through several iterations over the years. Although it wasn’t my intention I ended up reworking an image that I have had some success with for a YouTube video on converting images to Black and White in Capture One. The end result I believe was better than the original image which was a finalist in the International Landscape Photography Awards (2015) as well as being featured in Nikon magazine. Ten years of software development plus an additional ten years of experience lent themselves towards improving the photograph somewhat. 

This is not to say that we should all dive into our libraries and find images that to rework. I actually think that wouldn’t be such an intelligent use of time. I mention it here as an example of being able to go back and improve images, but that isn’t the real advantage of a fit to bursting hard drive of unseen images. No, it’s the unworked images that are valuable. Images that I glossed over at the time, or felt that I didn’t have the time to be able to do them justice. In some cases images that were too difficult to work are now simplicity itself with improved software. 

Below is a two image stitch that I shot in 2016 during a landscape workshop in Namibia. I stumbled across it the other day when looking for a different image. On seeing it I recognised it as being an image that I had briefly tried to process, been unsuccessful and moved on. This time round the software had no problems in stitching the images together. Where there were small niggles, my experience was now able to fix that which I previously had no idea how to fix. Suddenly an image which I had given up on almost ten years ago, had enough merit to not only process, but also to use in a project I was working on. 

A two image panorama that simply didn't work the first time I tried to edit this in 2016. Ten years later and software which struggled back then had no issues in putting the files together to make this panoramic stitch.

There is also something to be said for looking at images with fresh eyes. Going back ten years, or more, is maybe a stretch, but it is interesting how many more worthwhile images I am able to find in catalogues where I could have sworn I had already mined out all the worthwhile imagery. Possibly no longer being as close to the moment of capturing the image helps. We have a tendency to think of the moment of pressing the shutter with a heightened sense of anticipation. When the memory is fresh, the disappointment that it isn’t quite what we hoped for, is somewhat more tangible. Soften that with a few years and suddenly those images, although not quite perfect, look darn good after all. 
Some of the earliest advice I was given when I shifted from film to digital was that it was a good idea to wait a few days, if not weeks, before starting to process images from a shoot. This was when photographers were still heady with the idea that one could capture an image, process and deliver  it in literally minutes. It still isn’t surprising to see participants on workshops capture an image in the morning and have it processed and up on the ‘socials’ shortly after returning for breakfast. Sadly we have become programmed by the incessant need to produce, produce, produce that we don’t really stop to think about the photographs and what we want to do with them anymore. The slowdown period of waiting for the film to come back from the labs is simply not there. So, we grab the most obvious image in the folder, spit it out into the wide world and forget about the other potential treasures in the day’s library of images. That advice given some 20 years ago is probably more valuable now than it’s ever been. Give some time to cool between the shoot and the cull, and you’re likely to be both more forgiving on yourself as well as more discerning in what you select and work on. 

Another image I stumbled across while going back through old archives. This was shot in autumn of 2014 on a hike up to the Drakensberg escarpment. Clearly at the time I must have felt that the image didn't have enough impact. Now, almost 12 years later, I find myself drawn more to the quieter images, like this one.

When enough time passes we are also able to look at our older images with eyes that have matured artistically. Images that we were excited by two, five or even ten years ago, might have been exciting at the time based on what we interested in, who we were inspired by, and the trends that were current at the time (think back to 2010 when surreal HDR was the ‘in-thing’). Photos that you may have glossed over then could suddenly hold a lot more promise now. 

Finally, one of the most important aspects of activating your ‘way-back’when’ machine of an archive, is the memory of the shoot itself. This is a far more personal, introspective use of looking at your old unedited images. I find that by doing this I am able to get new ideas for locations that I am likely to be visiting again. I’ll see photographs that didn’t quite work, but have merit in trying again, either compositionally or technically. And, of course, there is the nostalgia of the event itself, whether it was for a professional commercial project, or for a personal artistic goal. Nostalgia and memory are the core reasons why generative AI cannot fully replace photography. Photography is still rooted in the real (even if that foundation is tenuously manipulated through excessive photo-editing and re-imagining). A photograph, no matter how much photoshop is used, still requires that the photographer have been somewhere at some time to record that image. That memory of the moment cannot be replaced. 

I had a photography student explain to me a few days ago that she always goes through her photos and deletes all but the very best ones. It’s a great way to save hard-drive space, but I would urge that we be slightly less aggressive in the culling process. Certainly out of focus or truly horrendously poorly exposed images should be turfed. Don’t go so far as to only keep what you consider to be the cream of the crop though. Wait a few years and quite possibly what you think are great now, might only be a small portion of a much larger batch of equally impressive image. You just need some time to recognise it.