This summer I shot more photographs than any other summer in my entire life. When you are constantly shooting, especially for the love of it, your number of unedited photographs tends to just pile up in folders and on external hard drives. Even when we are organized and specific with names and separating the files, there are always a few photographs that just go untouched.
The photograph above is a prime example of one that I forgot I had. There is actually a whole album of photos just like this from an amazing weekend with friends in lower Michigan. I told the guys I wanted to do some light painting and they had no idea what I was talking about or what it would even look like. Once we took one photograph on the beach in the middle of the night, they were hooked. We all got creative and pumped up to try new things. First it started off with one of us at a time and then we realized that collaborating would really take it to the next level. It was a ton of fun.
This specific photograph above was created using three people, a flashlight and a lantern. Sam did his rockstar pose and stood still for 30 seconds. During that time period Andrew and Chris ran around him multiple times to create the light streaks that you see. Andrew’s face and upper body are some what visible in ghost-like form on each side of same since that is when he was behind or next to the light source for the camera to capture. Chris ran his light source around Sam’s legs and all the way up to his hand. We were all surprised by the way it looked after the camera was done processing the long exposure. It came out better than we expected!
It was so refreshing to run into this file today while on my lunch break at work. I lost internet access on my computer, so I just scanned around until I found something I may have missed and sure enough I found it! The cool thing about going back to old files and photographs is that even if you may have edited it before, you can apply new editing you have learned recently to them and make them even better or completely different. It is even great to just see your progress from the way you edited before to the way that you edit now. It really is a great way to see the progress you have made.
I find important to be patient if you are always feeling that you aren’t getting any better at something. We may not see it, but every day of our lives we make progress in many different and sometimes unusual ways. So I encourage you to forget about things once in a while so that you won’t have to think about being patient so often. Running across random forgotten things is always a huge blessing in my eyes. Being forgetful isn’t always a bad thing.
