Super Dad 1, Photography 0

As I mentioned in last weeks blog post the winter months are playing havoc with my ability to get out and take pictures. However, last weekend it wasn't the weather or the short days that stopped me getting out with the camera. My wife was away for a well deserved break so I was left holding the fort with the kids. So unless you count some family snapshots as photography it was a shutter free weekend.

Competition Time

Not one to let the lack of camera action stop me from scratching my photography itch I decided I would get together my entries for this year's South West Coast Path photography competition. This is my first year entering this competition and it looks like a good place to hopefully show case one of my images. It's also good to see that they have respected landscape photographer Adam Burton on the judging panel.

The Power of the Catalogue

Fortunately a lot of my photography takes place along the South West Coast Path so I had a good range of images to work from. It was also really easy to find them. I'm a Lightroom user and I like to keyword my images. I don't keyword all my images on import, but any image that I complete editing on gets a full set of keywords. So when it came to finding all my 4 and 5 star images taken on the South West Coast Path it was a matter of just creating a dynamic collection and there they all were.

Creating a dynamic collection allowed me to find all my images from the South West Coast Path.

Finding A Gem

Winning images from the competition will be published in the South West Coast Path 2018 calendar and while the rules didn't preclude the inclusion of vertical orientation images I thought I'd stick with horizontal orientation. The slight problem was that I had a series of images from Trevose Head that I had taken earlier in the year and while I was very happy with them, they were all of vertical orientation.

I had a couple of options. I could either submit a vertical orientation image or bypass my Trevose Head images all together. I knew I would have taken images in both orientations so I right clicked the one the Trevose Head images and selected the collection it was in. (I add each photo shoot to it's own collection so it was easy to find).

Almost immediately I found what I was looking for. Best of all though the image had been mostly processed to completion. It only needed a bit of dodging and burning in the sky and it was ready to go. At the time I must have done a basic edit on it and then ditched it in favour of the vertical version. With a few clicks I had a new image and the competition entry I was looking for.

This is the image I found in my catalogue and have now entered into the competition.

Check Your Catalogue

Finding this image has made me think about what other images I might have lurking in the depths of my Lightroom catalogue. How many other images were culled during the editing phase in favour of a different composition?

What about you? Do you have a back catalogue of images with some hidden gems? Do you process your images straight away or leave them for a bit and come back to them at a later date? If you cull an image is it culled forever? Let me know in the comments.