Here’s a sunrise for your Saturday, courtesy of Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.
And now, class, here’s your lessons for today.
My editor wanted me to send him some images of cliff dwellings I’d captured during my visit to this national park some years ago (10 years, actually – same year I started volunteering photos and articles to the National Parks Traveler). As I was perusing all the images, I came across this sunrise shot photographed from the balcony of my room at the Far View Lodge. I noticed I’d never done anything with it – probably because I thought it wasn’t very good afterall, and because I didn’t have the editing skills to bring out the beauty of the shot. I did something that all of you should do with photos you don’t think are worth anything but that are technically ok (i.e. not blurred or really grainy): keep it until you have the skills to return to work on it.
I don’t care what anybody says, it’s my opinion that every image you capture needs some bit of tweaking. Sometimes, it needs quite a bit of tweaking to bring out what your eyes saw when you composed and captured the image. This image is a good example.
The original image is dark and muddy and has some extraneous junk in the corner (a part of the balcony roof) as well as a couple of sensor spots. I could have deleted the image and gone on about my business, but I chose to keep it (actually, I think I just passed by it and forgot about it for all these years). Now, some 10 years later, I’ve returned to work on it, and it’s not turned out too badly, I think. With improvement in my photo skills, I’ve been able to bring out details and color previously hidden, and cleaned up the composition as a whole.
You can do all this too. Just keep practicing and learning new editing skills, and don’t delete those photos you think are not that great. They might be real keepers.
Copyright Rebecca L. Latson, all rights reserved.
Where The Trails Take You Photography 
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