RE-EDITING OLD PHOTOS DURING CORONA QUARANTINE

Although myself and everyone I know are still healthy, Corona still pretty much fucked up my year. Since all airshows are cancelled so are all the photo flying projects in July. So instead of flying in the UK for two weeks, I’ll be sitting at home. And also my trip around the world in July-August seems doomed.

In other words, every opportunity to make new work is either cancelled or close to being cancelled. Maybe I’ll get some new opportunities later in the year, but maybe we will still be social distancing and I don’t get to shoot anything in 2020.

To fight boredom; to have something to edit and to have some new pictures, I went into my archive and started editing some old photos. I went through photos from Iceland (2015), the USA (2016) and Spain (2017).

Except for the reasons stated above, editing old photos has more advantages.

My editing style changes constantly. I’m always trying new things and with every shoot I find something new or I start to see things differently. So it’s good to go through old pictures every once in a while and edit photos in a different way.
Sometimes I just can’t get a picture right so I end up archiving it, but years later I might make it work.
Sometimes time is essential and some pictures only get their value over time. Like when things start to look nostalgic.
I also look differently at photography and my photos than before. Like when I went to the USA in 2016 I focussed mainly on the landscapes and famous landmarks, I barely shot any of the ‘small’ moments or ordinary places. Something I regret now, but I also didn’t edit any of those small moments that I did shoot. So it’s fun to find these now and edit them.
Even If I don’t find anything useful it’s still a lot of fun to see all these memories. There are things I totally forgot about that I now remember again. And this whole corona thing makes me appreciate those travels even more.

Unfortunately in the end I do mainly see a lot of missed opportunities. The last two years my ideas completely changed and I would shoot the same travels in a totally different way now. It’s frustrating at times to see how much things I didn’t photograph or shot poorly. On the other hand, it shows that I grow in photography. Also, traveling is mainly about the experiences rather than the pictures. Something I shouldn’t forget.

Seeing these photos also reminds me of the never ending struggle of choosing to go to new places or to revisit a place I’ve already been to. I can totally understand that you can only photograph a place properly if you’ve been there before and know it well. It’s easy to look in hindsight at these pictures and point out all the things I missed, but these are things I didn’t know when I was there.

I usually never go to the same place twice, but I was lucky enough to go to London several times and to visit New York twice. The blogpost I made about comparing my 2015 pictures from New York with the ones from 2019 shows how differently you shoot the same place on the second visit.

Depending on how this Corona thing is evolving I might (be forced to) go through some more albums, even some recent ones like the one from Nepal last year.

Stay tuned and stay safe!