It never hurts to check back through old images.  I apply a fairly rigorous editing process to my images.  After a shoot I download the images and then begin the deleting.  Using Adobe Lightroom I first find any images that are out of focus, poorly exposed, etc. and delete them.  Next I go through and flag all the images that I think may have some promise.  Looking at just the flagged images I now go through again and give each image a rank from one to three stars, with three stars being the top level images.  Finally I give color codes to some of the stared images, red to indicate a prime select and yellow to indicate a basic stock image.  Once this is done I am now able to quickly get back to the best images from a shoot as well as sort them by their potential future use.

However, I need to stay in the practice of going back and looking through the images that didn’t receive a star or a color label from time to time.  Often I will find a great image that slipped through the cracks or that I had a bias against at the time, but looks more appealing once I have distanced my mind from it a bit.  The photo above of one of the rock formations and beach near Bandon is one such photo.  When I took the photo I was hoping for a brilliant sunrise, so when the dawn came with gray conditions I was disappointed, but still dutifully took a few images.  My lack of enthusiasm for the day affected how I saw this image when I was first editing the group of images it was in and it didn’t make the cut.  Nearly a year later I came across it while searching for different beach images.  Now that I have had time to distance my mind from the fact that there wasn’t a colorful sunrise the image really stands out to me.  Now I rather like the dramatic, dark and somewhat ominous feel and muted tones.  I have also moved the image quite a bit higher in my ranking system.