By Ken Hubbard
Whenever I go without shooting images for a week or two, I know it's time to commit myself to looking through images that I had taken a few years ago. I do this in order to take a fresh look at images from the past, and more often than not I find 1 or 2 images that I placed in a DNU (Do Not Use) folder that end up being pretty good. For all of us, our tastes and styles of what we like or dislike is constantly changing. So, going back to images every so often is a good habit to get into. For the photographer that is new to digital retouching this is even more important to do, since your abilities to color correct and retouch images will get better with time. You will be able to go back to images that may have been beyond your abilities in the beginning but may be much easier to deal with now, allowing you to make them look the way you want. So, don't just put your images in a folder on your desktop or external hard drive and forget about them, I can almost guarantee there are some great images just waiting for you to take a second look at them.
On my last look back at images from years past, I found this dramatic road image which was taken while driving to Zion National Park. For some reason I had completely ignored it and never gave it a second glance until now. At the time, I had been driving through some pretty good thunderstorms from the moment I left Las Vegas on highway 15. As I made my way closer to Zion, now on Route 9 somewhere between the towns of La Verkin & Virgin, UT the rain stopped and the clouds started to break a little. All of a sudden there was a bright light in my rear view and side mirrors, and when I looked back this is what I saw. Of course I immediately pulled to the side of the road grabbed my camera (Nikon D700 with the Tamron 28-300mm VC lens) and started shooting. I can't tell you why I left it in a folder till now, but what I can say is don't forget to look back!
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