Doing a Second Edit

A Second Edit

I spent part of today doing a second edit – nearly two years after the first one – on my Iceland 2010 images. These second edits are important to me, for two reasons. First, we miss images on our first edit, and the closer that edit happens to the moments of making the photographs, the more we get seduced by those moments, our expectations, and our disappointments. A little distance, like a few months or years, can help bring some objectivity. Or a broader perspective to our subjectivity. Either way, at least for me, it reveals images I had once passed over.

The second advantage is that while the images may not have changed in two years, our vision has, and so has our technique. Revisiting the images for a second edit can allow us to work on those images more slowly, and with an improvement in our craft that we didn’t have two years ago.

Take some time in the coming days to revisit your libraries and give your images another glance, you might be surprised what you come up with. I discovered a dozen images from Iceland and a whole B&W series that was just waiting to be discovered. These are some of them.