An old photo revisited

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.