I unfortunately haven’t had much opportunity to do much photography recently so I decided that I would use this time productively by going through my entire library of photos and seeing if I had any photos that I have never published, or to see if there are any I can permanently delete. My library is currently sitting at 6631 photos so I think I am going to be doing this for a long time.

The very first photo listed in my library is dated 08 March 2014 17:33:24 and one thing that came apparent to me is how far I have came as a photographer since then, not just technically, but in style. My original objective of salvaging any unused photos for publishing soon changed to re-editing photos that I had been previously proud of but now I either don’t like or feel I could edit better now.

Take the following photo for example, originally taken 16 April 2016 at Dunure in Ayrshire, Scotland.

(Drag the arrows left or right to compare the shots)

The Before:
Three years ago I loved the strong purple hues, to me not only did it help contrast and accentuate the orange of the sunset, but gave the impression that it was it was getting late in the day.

The After:
The exact same photo but re-edited 06 December 2019. The colours are alot more subdued and natural looking.

So which version is better? Well I guess the answer to that is subjective… some people might prefer the 2016 version… some might prefer the 2019 version.
As for me? Well the fact I re-edited the photograph should give you that answer. 😉

But as a sidenote, isn’t it amazing that you can get such dramatically different looking images from the same photo? That is the beauty of shooting RAW, it allows you the photographer to capture as much information about a scene as possible, then using image manipulation software brighten the scene, darken the scene even completely change the colour of the scene without a loss of quality.