Recently I made the (possibly ill-conceived) decision to revisit my piece Virtueand completely rework this image I had taken over two years ago. This was kind of a big deal for me. When I first ventured into the realms of photoshop and image editing, I made a rule for myself that I would never go back and re-edit an old image for one reason: growth.

I first got Photoshop as a gift from my cousin years and years ago. I immediately made a concerted effort to watch every single tutorial and read every forum relating to Photoshop the internet had to offer.

Spoiler alert: there's a lot.

My efforts were rewarded, however, as I began to see improvement, and found myself enjoying photography more and more as time went on. I also found it incredibly tempting to go back and re-edit photos I had taken months and even years previous. Photography has been a hobby of mine since my family and I moved to India while I was in high school, and I had a lot of really interesting photos that I was sorely tempted to go back and "fix" with my improving talent.

I will readily admit that am a perfectionist, to a fault, and I realized that allowing myself to rework old photos could quickly lead me into a black hole of "edit, learn something new, rework, and repeat". So I forced myself to recognize that improvement and growth comes from looking forward and trying new things, and definitely not from trying the same thing over and over again. Of course, I'm saying this about a month after I published three reworks of Integrity... But, unlike with Virtue, though, which I was absolutely in LOVE with and was able to proudly display for all the internet to see, as soon as I finished Integrity I decided I didn't like it and immediately started over.

I had never finished an image, been happy with it, and then walked away from it for years at a time before coming back to it, as was the case with Virtue.

Until this past December.

Here is the piece after completion in November of 2013:

Now here is the same photo reworked in December of 2015:

So why did I decide to go back to this piece nearly two years later?

The same reason I decided NOT to go back and edit old photos: Growth.

(**If you're curious about the meaning and symbolism behind this piece, you can read about it here, in my first blog post about Virtue. Disclaimer: it may or may not contain cringe worthy writing from my younger blogging self. Why oh why did I never go back and edit my posts before publishing?**) 

Virtue is part of an eight part series which I am currently working on. Yes, it's taken over two years, and I'm not even half way through. Let's not get into that. I legitimately made finishing this series one of my New Year's resolutions.

I digress.

Considering the amount of growth I'm happy to have experienced in the world of photography, I felt like there were stark differences in the mood, skill, and technique in my more recent photos in the series and I wanted my images to feel like they all belonged together (you can see the other two pieces here and here). In essence, I wanted this series to look like I wasn't such a tremendous slacker and hadn't taken the photos years apart.

So what have I learned from this? A few things:

1) Sometimes it's alright to live life on the edge and break your own rules.

2) However I still wouldn't make it a regular exercise to re-edit old photos. There were many times when I wanted to give up on this one and just let it take its subpar place in the series. To say the least, it was a very fierce battle between my perfectionism and my desire to work on other (newer and therefore more fun) pieces. Not incredibly enjoyable, I will confess.

3) Thank heavens someone invented the raw file format. 

AND

4) Perseverance is important if you want to finish a piece that's taken over two years to complete.

Here's a gif on how the magic happened (the second time around):