I once read an article by Trey Ratcliff at StuckInCustoms.com where he mentioned that you should not process your images for a year after taking them. This gives you time to learn new things and process them in a way that you are happy with.
Did i listen to him? NO! But, I did learn a valuable lesson from all of this the other week. While I am too impatient (yes, me, impatient…I think my parents told me that at least once a day growing up) to wait a year to process after taking them I have been going back and re-precessing a few old images. The images below are not necessarily the exact files that I processed the first time but they are in the same group of raw files from the same day.
These images were taken about a year ago the day after I purchased my Nikon D7000 just so I could bracket and do HDR. I of course processed them immediately, and learned Photomatix on the fly. Knowing nothing about bracketing, hand holding for the images, and using these photos as my first lesson in Photomatix I would say they turned out well.
The images above have been sold and even won a few contests, but his weekend with some of the new things I learned from watching HDR tutorials by Brian Matiash and Trey Ratcliff I was able to produce images that impress me more. The level of realizim is closer to what I prefer for these scenes while still capturing the dramatic affect. I was also now able to see more images out of the series that I wanted to develop becasue my experience of composition has grown to better understand what I want/need and had in those images.
