Back in June I blogged about the Flickr Memories functionality I’d added to my website, and finished the post off with this sentence:
I’m excited to see what forgotten gems from the past show up, and also being reminded of how terrible I was when I was first starting out taking photos.
And oh boy, has it delivered on that second part in particular! I make a point of checking both my formerly-Tumblr-posts Memories page where I post all my random iPhone photos as well as the Flickr one each day, and in August of both 2008 and 2012 we were in Boston (in 2008 it was the first time I was visiting Kristina overseas back when she was still living there, and in 2012 we went back for her birthday) and I’d posted all the trip photos to Flickr.
Looking back at the 2008 photos (and all the photos I’d taken prior to that), they’re very much just happy-snaps… there was zero processing done on them, they were awkwardly-framed and weren’t straightened — crooked horizons ahoy! — and there was no culling, I’d just post them allll. I have a collection created for that trip where you can see the full horror (check out the sheer number of photos in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery album for example… why did I need to post that many?!).
In 2009 I borrowed an old Canon EOS 400D from a co-worker at Apple for a while, which was my first exposure to a proper DSLR and properly-shallow depth of field, as well as shooting in RAW, and doing actual post-processing. I had way too much fun adding heavy vignetting to everything, but I was starting to cull my photos rather than just dumping everything online!
In 2010 we bought a Canon EOS 7D with a 35mm f/2 lens, and my photography and processing skills definitely improved (that link is every single photo I took with the 7D, in order of date posted from oldest to newest).
Going back to Boston, some sample photos from Rockport and Boston Public Library on 2012’s trip shows the improvement from 2008. For some reason I was pretty far into too-heavy-handed territory with the post processing specifically for the Boston trip photos, but you can see the greatly-improved framing and composition.
From there on my skill has been on a upwards path, and thankfully I’ve stopped doing the EVERYTHING MUST BE REALLY HIGH CONTRAST thing I was doing for a while there. 😛 For travel photos specifically, the easiest way to see the progression is the “Travel” category of posts I have set up here! Some choice examples:
A while back I’d toyed with the idea of reprocessing my older photos, in particular the 2012 Boston ones, but I realised that way lies madness and never-ending editing, and I wouldn’t have a nice historical record of my photographical endeavours like I do now.