Finding Buried Treasure

I’ve mentioned previously the idea of looking at older photos with “new eyes” and re-processing them to find hidden gems. This is another of those.

Due to seasonal limitations (weather, family, illness, etc.), I haven’t been out to shoot new images lately, but have been going back over some of my Lightroom collections where I recall having some interesting photos that I’ve never really tried to process fully, yet I recall them having potential.

Clearing storm near Abereron

Recently I’ve been browsing photos from a 2008 visit to the UK. We landed in London, visited Oxford and the Cotswolds, Wales (based in Aberystwyth), Scotland (Inverness, Skye, St. Andrews and Edinburgh), and back to England (Yorkshire). These images are with my first DSLR, a Pentax istDL, so the resolution is less, but the quality isn’t bad.

The image at right is of a clearing storm near Aberaeron, Wales (our visit was in late March, so it was a lovely time of year - daffodils were out everywhere, it was lambing season, but there was a bit of rain, and even some snow, quite frequently).

This was another of those “buried treasures”. I like the image, but it was flat and not very interesting when I saw it on the screen. At the time, I lacked the post-processing skill, and the software, to produce the look I had envisioned when the photo was taken. Going back to it now, using Lightroom and Photoshop, I was able to lower the overly-bright highlights in the water, and add a gradient to increase the contrast in the sky and bring out the shafts of sunlight.

Do you have some “buried treasures”?