editing old photos

Sometimes browsing and re-editing photos doesn't have to be with photos that are very old. Let's suppose, for instance, that I've learned quite a bit about taking and editing photos since JT was 6 months old: January 9, 2008.

So I would likely not take these hideous photos any more:

Ok, so I probably still take photos that are just this awful in color and background choices. But let's be clear, he was an awfully cute baby. And now that he's not a baby any more, I want to preserve and cherish as many images of those chubby cheeks as I can.

In the past two years, I've taken and edited quite a lot of photos. And I now know a few more tricks for making ugly photos work for me. At the moment, black and white images are my favorites.

When I started working with Lightroom, one of the books I read suggested keeping original files for this very reason. If you edit a photo you take today, keep the original file preserved. Save your changes in a file with a different name. Lightroom and even iPhoto will also help you do this. These pictures from my archive happened to be preserved as originals and modified images within iPhoto.

Let's think of it as a memory saved.