I’ve been trying to bring some discipline to how I organize my photographs. I’ve got about 12,000 slides and negatives (at least!) to manage and I use the Adobe Lightroom database to keep track of everything. I’m starting to own the fact that I’m a photo hoarder. Instead of keeping the best photographs of a subject, I just keep everything, which makes things harder to find and slows down the database.

I was cleaning up my Riding Mountain file and found this photograph that I call Yellow Pine. My finger hovered above the delete key for a second before I relented and clicked “Develop” to see if I could make Yellow Pine presentable, and, hopefully, more interesting that it was as an undeveloped raw image. What was supposed to be a 3-minute quick check turned into over an hour of exploring different looks for Yellow Pine. No regrets: getting lost in the process is exactly what hobbies are for and I’m on holidays.

To be honest, I’m still not sure if Yellow Pine is “there”, even with the multiple incarnations that I’ve presented in the video. Good photo editing requires one to be ruthless in asking tough questions about the technical and aesthetic quality of each photograph. I’ve learned, though, that I can be too critical of my own work and that others need to remind me not to nitpick. So, please remind me! Take a look at the video and tell me what you think - Which is your favourite version of Yellow Pine? Leave a comment on my Kerry Enns Photography Facebook page.

Kerry