About 25 years ago, I was seriously into motorsport photography. I’d go to a meet, shoot off ten or more rolls of film and hope to have half a dozen keepers. My first DSLR (a Nikon D70) paid for itself in a single season, in saved film purchase and processing costs, but that’s another story.
Almost 20 years ago, I was headed from my home in Bristol (in the southwest of England) to Brands Hatch in Kent to shoot a round of the British Touring Car Championship with my second DSLR, a Nikon D200.
My route took me past the historic site of Stonehenge, just as the sun was coming up. I actually stopped, poked my camera through a hole in the wire mesh fencing, took a quick snap and then carried on to the main event.
Back at home in the evening, I pored through all my shots of the various races and pit-lane activities, glossing over what I thought was a rather disappointing Stonehenge shot.
When I was a kid, my pro photographer dad told me that painters had it easy. If they didn’t want something in the picture, they’d just leave it out. Overhead cables, unsightly rubbish and other paraphernalia were of no consequence to them.
Photographers, on the other hand, had no choice but to include all the clutter within a scene. Suffice to say that Photoshop and other photo editing software wasn’t around when my dad was in the business.
I drove past Stonehenge again earlier this year. The original road that ran along the north and east of the perimeter has long been buried over and you can’t get near enough to take a meaningful shot. Unless that is, the site is open – in which case it’ll be full of tourists. That’s when I wondered if I might be able to do something with my old dud photo, after all these years.
Having grown up with the mentality of ‘always’ keeping film negatives in shoeboxes for posterity, I never delete my digital cameras’ RAW files. I simply shuffle them off onto hard drives and solid state drives, keeping multiple copies in different places, just to be on the safe side.
It only took a couple of minutes to locate the RAW file. And it only took a few more to open it in Photoshop, correct the white balance to bring out the sunrise colors, darken the sky, clone out the fencing and pedestrian walkway, and to end up with an image that I’m really very happy with.
With hindsight, it’s much more interesting and memorable than my countless motorsport shots. I’m just really glad that I didn’t get rid of it back in the day, after being initially unimpressed with it. Never hit delete!
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