The Importance of Keeping The Missed Shots

I often hear people say they take a pictured it isn't what they saw and that the photograph just didn't turn out. It happens to everyone. Taking the photograph is so exciting but the file out of the camera doesn't live up to the experience. When I go back over photographs that I have passed over I ask myself "Why did I take that?" I'll look at it and say the pattern or the layers of lines. All that may seem lost in the unedited photograph. Thinking back to why I took the photograph and what I visualized in the scene verses what I see on the screen gives me direction in how to edit the photograph to bring that out.

In this case the original unedited photo is nothing like the image I wanted to capture. When I \first looked at this image I dismissed it as a missed shot. Tonight when I looked at it again I remembered my vision of this image or what I meant to capture. The shapes and contrast were lost in the haze. Remembering how I saw this guided my editing to produce the image I envisioned but missed in my first look at the pictures.

This screenshot shows the before and after of the edited photograph. The lesson is to remember why you took the photograph. I'm glad that I went back for a second look and didn't delete what I first dismissed as a failed image.

Toronto 2017