Making the Old New Again

Whenever I go out shooting i always save every photo, even the bad ones(unless it is absolutely, without question, 100% unusable).

The reason I do this is because when I'm bored I go through old collections of unedited photos.

I go out and shoot a project and when I come home I always get straight to editing. I find all the best photos and I'll go through 3 or 4 edited versions of each before I have the "final" version. I upload them to flickr, post them on a photo message board, and then I blog about them. All of that done within a matter of hours, at most a day or two.

But when I go back through the photos on those boring nights and weekends, months after the photos were take, sometimes years, I always come across a new photo to edit. Time away from the photos can give you a fresh eye. You'll see something you didn't see before. Or you may re-edit a photo because you've learned a new technique, you've fine-tuned your existing editing skills, or you have a better program to use.

That's what I did last night. Over the last month or so I've been using Adobe Lightroom 3 to do most of my editing and I now prefer it over photoshop. Last night I was bored and revisited the pepper harvest from last year. I've looked through these photos many, many times and I still managed to find photos I could edit for the first time or improve in some way.

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1250)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1600)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1600)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1000)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1250)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/1600)

(Nikon D300 ISO 200, f/5.6 @ 1/4000)

When I originally edited the pepper harvest I did everything in black and white. That's just what I prefer for this kind of work. But for these I decided to keep the color to really show off the great tones in the sky, peppers, and plants.

I might even prefer these over the originals.