New Light through Old Windows

To clear space on my computer, I’ve been going through every file to find RAW images. Thorough searching has turned up a plethora of files, containing RAW images from as far back as 2010. I’ve been editing them and exporting them to jpeg files and the space cleared has been phenomenal.

  • Tower bridge in 2014

I’ve learned a lot from this process. My image editing speed has risen and I’ve become more organised in my photo collating: over the years, files have become organised by date and place, rather than subject, titles, moods and whatnot; I hope to find an ideal filing system in future, but for now, my filing has never been more organised.

The main aspect I’ve learned is in my ability to edit an image, especially when I come across photographs that I have edited some years previously. Like shining new light through old windows, my editing vastly improves on what I have done before. I’ll be printing some of these new images soon.

This last aspect has left me wondering about when an image is complete. I must have felt that I had done a decent job editing some years ago, only to supplant those efforts more recently. How may I edit those photos in a year’s time? How do I know when an image has been edited enough? When will a photograph be “correct”? And what is a correct image? One that represents an event with perfect accuracy, or one that lives up to one’s personal memory or expression?

I have also been wondering more about how I use editing programmes. I recently wrote about taking a deeper dive in using Photoshop: part of that deeper dive concerns thinking about what kind of images I want to create. There are many photographers I follow: snappers, artists, portraitists, fashionistas; they all have their own way of looking at their worlds. They all worked towards their particular view, so in my new photographs, I hope to experiment towards a view of my own.