Year 5 Day 9 - Image Review and Rediscovery

As part of my new file management strategy, I've been looking at many old images.

A couple of the first things that come to mind are:

I'm glad I shot RAW+JPG some times, even when I was still only planning to use the JPG. I just wish I had ALWAYS shot in RAW+JPG. Now that I use Lightroom I shoot just RAW.

There are places I've been and images I saw but didn't quite capture the way I had wanted to, or how I wish I had now. At the moment a sunrise shot of a tree at Assateague comes to mind. Shot in JPG (braketed for HDR, but not in RAW) and not composed how I wished at all.

Read on for more.

Most of the time I charge full speed ahead and wake up very early, get somewhere by sunrise, shoot all kinds of things. Hundreds of images. And then often during the same day, once I get home, I try to blast through the 'catch' and see what is good and apply very quick edits so I have a smaller set of images to then further review.

I do often get images I like, but, there's something missing from this approach.

When it comes to that tree at Assateague I need to plan to correct that. I need a shot list. I need to review a catch from a trip like that where I went for 5 days, but wished I had more. I need to review and catalog the result and plan from that.

While this image below was the result of some random planning and luck, I now am a little wiser and will shoot smarter next time.


I've shot at the Jefferson before, and this time traveled with less gear and went looking for new angles, new compositions and then ultimately got lucky with the squirrel.

And not to totally just focus on my own images, I've been poking around and looking to people that aren't on flickr and do quite well at their image making. The Cape May Birding site has some awesome image. They've featured work from photographers and here's the archive - www.birdcapemay.org/gallery/main.php/Archive/ - Greg Downing's images were inspiring, and I plan to look in to those archives further.

I'm hoping to have fun and consistently make better images. Here's a recent image that is just a little different and maybe better than a lot of my previous photos. I like it because it is nature, man, an intersection of the two, what nature does in response. (There's a dead fox, hit by a car no doubt, and then there's an eagle feeding on the remains...)



And the above shuns off the problem with the image. The eagle and fox aren't 90% of the image's pixels. Instead they are maybe 2%, and that just adds to it...

Year 5 Day 9 - Image Review and Rediscovery