mini: Retrospection
“Your past is not a tunnel to who you are today, it shines, it darkens, it fractures like a prism. It does not define us. What does is how we look back on it, how we carry ourselves now and how we perceive things in the future upon reflection and acceptance. We can then in comfort know that we are not the same as we were, and ensure when we do revisit our old selves, we do so for the sake of growth.”
A couple of common practices of mine are:
1) overshoot everything - when flowers, raindrops, and blades of grass are your subjects, any slight wind movement or breath causes movement and so an unfocused image. I have always manually focused my macro photos - in fact I find it quite uncomfortable/more difficult to use auto. As a result, cutting four hundred photos down to twenty seems to be my norm, and I get left with a lot of photos to leisurely edit over a long period of time after one shoot.
2) the subject of this post - revisiting old photos after a fair amount of time has passed. This isn’t something I do intentionally, it was only yesterday that realisation struck me on how often I do this, and so it will be intentional from now on. It’s akin to when you become aware of your own breathing and freak out because your awareness has made it seem alien (I apologise for doing this to you now haha).
20/04/24, canon 6D mark II, sigma 105 macro.
I posted this on instagram yesterday and it is now my latest obsession (I’m not embarrassed to say I love my own work). I organise my Lightroom folders by the types of photographs - macro, family, self portraits, specific events like my birthdays etc - and then whether they are edited or raw (unedited, I know they are not synonymous with each other, it’s just how my brain works). I clearly had the intention of editing this photo as I had placed it in its RAW state in my “EDITED - final” folder, but never did.
It seems I either overlooked it upon editing other photos from this shoot, so yesterday I stopped my organising frenzy and attempted to edit it. I can hand on heart say I would not have edited it like this six months or even a year ago - this palette and lighting are new approaches for me. My photographs tend to be very subdued, desaturated and on the shadowed side of things as far as editing is concerned, albeit you can always assume I will make everything as blue as possible.
I often end up with photos I don’t have a vision for, or the skillset to edit it to do them “justice”. I revisit them months or even years later. I think revisiting old work and applying new skills, current inspiration learned between then and now is not talked about much in the "creative" process. Looking back and learning from past work is the usual narrative, but the beauty in art, photography particularly, is seeing the potential in old shots we didn’t see before, and apply what we have learned between then and now to create something that matches our vision today.
one thing I have learned this year is, I can crop things however I want, I don’t need to justify or appeal my work to anybody.
If you’ve seen the photos I’ve been posting on my story (instagram) from other photographer’s accounts for the last eight months, you’ll know this colour palette has been in my mind for such a long time. However, I haven’t taken any new photos this year so i’ve just been waiting until I get the time to produce photographs to paint in this dreamy, airy, pastel manner. The thought of trying this style on my current/old photographs never occurred to me. In fact, I didn’t consciously think ‘I’m going to edit it this way’ when I was editing these bluebells.
Not only do we gain new skills or hone our current ones in our craft as time progresses, we gain new inspiration also. Our perspective can change in seeing others’ perspectives. And then all of a sudden, that photograph you didn’t quite love but also didn’t want to rule out suddenly has so much potential, and you’ve succeeded all expectations of yourself again.
Your past is not a tunnel to who you are today, it shines, it darkens, it fractures like a prism. It does not define us. What does is how we look back on it, how we carry ourselves now and how we perceive things in the future upon reflection and acceptance. We can then in comfort know that we are not the same as we were, and ensure when we do revisit our old selves, we do so for the sake of growth.
Retrospection:
[noun] the action of thinking about the past; reviewing/surveying past situations, especially in one’s own life. One can look in retrospection in an instance or as a (longer) process.
I’m still unsure about opening up comments on my blogs at the moment, so for now you can see the above bluebell post pinned on my instagram - go love it for me, and let me know if you’ve enjoyed this little yap of mine in the comments <3