why did I take that photo?

Have this happened to you? You were out and about on a trip or just around the neighborhood. You spotted something. You took a photo. You went home and loaded the batch of photos to your computer. Weeks or even months later, you finally got around to process them. You found this photo. It was unremarkable. You wonder why you had to spend time looking at it.

In my previous post, I said that the number one rule is:

"Photography is about highlighting your subject and removing everything else."

Before we can highlight the subject or remove everything else, we need to recognize what the subject was first. In case of this photo, I couldn't recall what the subject was.

Our brain is remarkable. It spotted something and realized that it could be a great photo. Before we could articulate why, we took a photo. Knowing that something was recorded, we moved on. If we don't go back and re-examine what was the subject that created the initial impression, we would be no better when the same situation present itself to us again.

That is why spending time on post-processing is so important. By looking at the photo carefully again, we forced ourselves to go back to the situation and rethink what the subject was. If we can figure it out and articulate it, we would be prepared. Next time, we will be able to recognize it and find a better way to highlight or isolate it. Better yet, we could seed out that situation and make a better version of the same photo.

An even more important benefit is training yourself to recognize the subject right away. If you can do that, you will be able to get a better picture the first time you encounter the subject. When you reexamine that photo in post, you will be training your brain on better highlighting and isolating it.

Even now, I still take photos that puzzle me in post-processing. Especially when I am photographing in bad weathers, I could be overwhelmed by the condition and took photos reactively. If I could process those photos within days, I could still tell why I was taking those photos, but it's not guarantee.

Of course, the flip side can also be true. You looked at the photo again and again and there was really nothing there.