I was telling a friend recently about all of the photos I made in Florida, about the ridiculous number of them (seriously, it’s embarrassing), and about culling them down to just a handful that I would do something with. I remarked that the rest of the set - the ones that didn’t make the cut - would be stashed away and forgotten until a later date, a year or two from now, when I would likely stumble across them, hone in on one, and think, “What was wrong with me? This image is fantastic!!”

It’s honestly one of my favorite things about what I do. It feels like finding treasure. Usually it happens on a day when I’m busy tracking down an old image for some purpose or another. The best is when it happens on a “blah” kind of day, when I’m feeling a little stuck and unsure of what I’m doing and where I’m going.

Take these two for example. I stumbled across these yesterday tracking down some older images I want to use in a print portfolio of my work. These pictures were made exactly one year ago today. And they were discarded about a day later. Why? I have absolutely no idea. That’s sort of the fun part of finding images like these; they are the stumbling upon of some past version of yourself, and you can only guess at what you were thinking at the time. In this case I imagine that it was a combination of not the subject I was looking for (I had spent the morning mostly making very minimalist pictures of bare and dead trees) and feeling like the moment I captured wasn’t close enough to the moment I felt.

So why then, do they look so much better a year later? It’s a weird thing, but time can completely change your relationship with an image, or with the past itself for that matter. You just have to learn to unsee it; to allow enough time to pass that you’re able - and willing - to see it with fresh eyes.