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.