I had no idea.

I had no idea.

Seriously. There are so many images that I’ve shot and forgotten about. I’m talking maybe over 1,000. Who knows? More perhaps?

Somewhere on a long-unused, aging hard drive these shots reside. And I have a bunch of similar drives, all with unedited images.

Back in the earlier days of my photographic career I was shooting everything. Kind of like now, but back then I really needed practice (which I still do). My intention was to leave behind my identity as an audio engineer and re-invent myself as an amazing professional photographer.

Back then I was a good photographer and had already been shooting for years. But, my main weakness was in editing. My Photoshop skills were intermediate at best and not up to my ability to compose an image.

Only countless years of practice, learning and execution would resolve this (or at least improve it). I guess this meant that I was left with an insane number of images that once shot, I had no idea nor the ability to take to finish. My brain could see things that my body couldn’t bring into reality.

Little did I know that I was on the right path. Just that the path would take a lifetime to complete. It still is.

Forget “next level”, I’m going for nothing less than “World Class” level photographic art. Achieving that is my lifetime goal. And what I’ve learned is that the more I learn, the more I need to learn.

This is why you see professional athletes at the top of their games still relentlessly practicing. So I adopted that mentality.

Though the repetition can seem nonproductive and it sometimes (ok, many times) feels like it, the results are there. Though microscopic and incremental, you just have to be able to recognize them and continue.

The image above, I photographed in 2017. Did some edits and put it away along with all the others. And it wasn’t until 2024 that it resurfaced. Right away, I knew that the original edit fell far short of what the image was intended to be. So I went all the way back to the RAW image captured and edited that completely from the beginning.

What it showed me was something that I’ve seen repeating in my work. That is: my compositional skills are still ahead of my editing. Though I’ve seen a far greater improvement in my editing abilities, they still haven’t kept up with my compositions.

I’m not terribly worried as it means that there are images that I’m capturing today that I may not edit for several years to come. Who knows where I’ll be then? It also means that I need to continue to photograph and edit as much as possible. That’s how you get good.

And just to prove that you don’t need the latest and greatest stuff, I photographed this image with a Sony A6000 camera and E 50mm f1.8 lens. You can get this camera/lens combo for a song today. Which, when I first ‘went professional’, my attitude was that if I was a good enough photographer then I could do great work with inexpensive gear. Looking back, I think I did.