taking a second look

I recently had dinner with a young woman who had just purchased a used film camera and was still working on her first roll of film. I loved her excitement about this new creative adventure and was surprised when she mentioned that she liked the idea of having to wait on the film to be processed. Delayed gratification is not something most seek these days.

In this age of digital photography, we tend to rush home and process (or at least look at) our photographs. And there are usually certain images that quickly become favorites, unless we happen to be one of those who doesn’t like anything at all on the first look. Both responses are natural, because we are responding to our work on a more emotional than objective level—seeing with strong overlays of the experience of making those photographs. We run the risk of either liking an image based on our memory or else feeling none of the photographs seem to live up to the experience itself. And while it is entirely possible that those immediate responses and image selections will hold up over time, odds are, the way we look at photographs changes given a bit of time and distance from the experience of making them.

Sometimes, when we revisit our photographs a week, month or more later, we wonder what excited us so much about a particular photograph or see new images that we like even better than our original selections. If nothing else, we can look at the work more objectively—to see what’s working and what’s not, what we really nailed and what we might want to try differently in the future. This is also when we see those odd things creeping in along the edges of the frame that we would swear were not there before. I especially find that I’d like to interpret the images differently—to make adjustments in the processing. This ability to look at photographs more objectively was one of the advantages of having to wait on film processing in the past—whether you did it yourself or sent the film off to a lab.

The image above is one I initially overlooked during my photo shoot at Fort Clinch back in March. I downloaded the images to my laptop that evening and played with a few selections, then transferred the files to my desktop computer, where they have been sitting untouched all spring. This image is more complex than most of the other photographs, but that’s also what I find interesting about it. There is line, shape, form, repetition, framed views, light and shadow, and ample texture—but without becoming overly busy. Visually, my eye has somewhere to go and a reason to come back and take a closer look around.

I don’t process every photograph I take. If anything, I work with very few of the images, leaving the bulk in their RAW format. Yet I often revisit these unprocessed image files when working on a long-term project, and I almost always stumble across images I originally overlooked. Once I came across an entire photo shoot that I never processed. They were photographs of ocean waves and the colors looked so dull compared to the way I remembered them, which is probably why I never wasted time on them. But several years later, having more experience processing these images, I saw the potential. As it turns out, it was one of the best series of seascapes I ever photographed. Such is the value of time.

One of the greatest benefits of digital photography is the instant gratification. But don’t forget to come back to your images again later. You might be surprised by what you discover.

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Registration is open for online and in-person workshops.

Photographing Plants in the Studio. Four weeks online beginning September 2. Late summer/early fall is the perfect time for gathering late-season flowers, seedpods, fruits and vegetables from gardens and markets to photograph. In this online course, I’ll show you how to create and use a small, portable studio and both natural and studio lighting to photograph flowers and other natural objects.

An Intimate Portrait of Place. Maine Media Workshops. October 7-11. This fall, I return to Midcoast Maine…my favorite place to be as the weather cools and the crowds dwindle. It is a great time to explore the rocky shoreline, rolling meadows, forests, harbor towns and historic sites. We’ll focus on how to move beyond the single image to create small bodies of work that tell stories or convey a strong sense of place.