A re-blog of a post from 2 years ago:

Your old photos are a treasure trove.

I reminded myself of this again last night: searching for some images for a client, I came across many great images that I had overlooked before. Like this, of Miss Halton 2009, Evangeline Mackell:

Some images are great because they remind you of the times you shot them in. Others, because they show friends you may have almost forgotten, or places that seemed humdrum at the time, but carry meaning in retrospect. Or perhaps they show people who have since become famous. Yet others, because they are artistically good. Some, because you simply overlooked them, and that is more common than you may think. Always revisit your images multiple times.

Also, over time, you get new insights into how to finish images. The image above is desaturated – my flavour of the moment. In this image, it makes it good.

One thing to do with your images is to:

1. Date them in the filename.
2. Organize your images in folders by date.

TIP: When images are imported into Lightroom, you have options, and here are two of the most useful ones to apply automatically when you import any image:

• File renaming. My images automatically get renamed upon import to “year+month+day+original filename:, so that an image named “MVWS0318” becomes “20100114-MVWS0318”. That way whenever I find this image on my hard drive in the future, I can quickly go to folder “/photos/2010/2010014-Toronto” to find the other pictures from this shoot.
• I set the camera calibration Profile to “Camera Standard”, not “Adobe Standard”. That way the images look more like the way they look on the back LCD after I shoot them.

More images:

As you see, even the waitress can make for a nice shot. Or people with nice backgrounds thrown out of focus:

Or people like my friend, animal lover and incredibly talented photographer Baz Kanda, who came to the Willems Studio Residence (i.e. here) to accompany me to a Flash course I taught a while ago. Here he is at Storey Wilkins’s residence and at a church, in January 2009:

Dallas Hansen at Lovegety Station – only the Japanese can come up with a word like “Lovegety”…:

And those are just a few random picks from a few random days a few years ago. Can you see the potential of revisiting old photos? They take you back.