Re-visit your older photos


Every now and again, I may be doing something completely different, and a photo I took many days, months, or even years ago, springs to mind. Occasionally, I decide to dig through my archives and take a look at it - and some times, this leads me to re-edit a lot of the photos I've taken a long time ago.

This happened again recently. Many years ago, I did a photo shoot for a theatre outfit which is called Tmesis Theatre these days - a physical theatre troupe consisting of a couple of deeply impressive physical theatre performers.

Adobe Lightroom to the re-rescue

By the power of Lightroom, I decided to see if I couldn't do a re-edit of these photos, and turn them into a coherent set of photos. The great thing about Lightroom is that you can create a set of edits, and then copy them onto a whole batch of images - which is what I did here. I edited one of the images very carefully - I decided to use two-toning, with a particular amount of grain, and a very specific 'look' to the images.

I copied the settings from that one image to all the others in the set, before cropping the images one-by-one, and tweaking the settings for each image (mostly for contrast and/or exposure).

The resulting gallery looks nothing like the original set of images I took - and yet, as a set, it works incredibly well. I'm currently looking into seeing if I can't make them work as an exhibition.

So, what's the lesson that can be learned from this? You're never finished with your photos: Keep them around, and re-visit them from time to time on (as the case is at the moment) a rainy day. You never know what hidden treasures you haven't yet tapped into, from the deepest depths of your archive!