An old photo revisited
There's some value to looking again.
The photo above was taken by me in Berlin in 2018. I've been going through some old pictures in an attempt to organise my 500px site and I stumbled on this one yesterday. The interesting thing (to me) about this is that it was sitting in my Lightroom catalogue, completely disregarded. That is to say that I came back from the Berlin trip, dumped the photos onto the computer, processed the ones I thought looked good and then did whatever I did with them. This picture was left behind because I clearly thought nothing of it.
Revisiting that Berlin album now, I see that all the pictures I liked were actually pretty bad. This one, though, has a (probably accidental) convergence of the white road markings and the shadow cast by the traffic lights into a single-point perspective that leads the eye to the building in the distance. I'm studying composition at the moment (clearly I wasn't then) and so this one jumped out at me.
I also love the colours. I mean LOVE them. The original colours were pretty good, but I threw this picture through a Kodak Portra 160 simulator yesterday and it just gave it this incredible look and put a little grain into the sky to give it some texture. I'm pleased with it.
All of which is to say that selection/editing is as important in photography as anything else. No one takes good pictures all the time, or bad pictures all the time. Your taste changes and a bad picture four years ago can become a good picture today.
There's probably a broader lesson to be learned from this, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to figure out what it is.
Have a good one.