Ten years ago today - Reviewing and critiquing my old photos

Ten years ago today, I was in Ireland exploring Trinity College. I thought it might be fun to review and critique my old photos with my current skills and tools. The top one is the original and the bottom one is the "new" one from 2025.

Original Photo from 2015

Edited in 2025

A few comments I'll offer to critique myself:

• The framing is decent. The Campanile is clearly the subject of the photo. There is enough foreground to give a sense of scale without overwhelming the lower half of the photo. Also, the camera is oriented with the sensor vertical so there is no perspective distortion. Sometimes, the tendency is to get up close and then angle the camera upwards to capture a tall structure. If a tilt-shift lens is not used, the top of the structure will appear to expand to ludicrous size.

• I shot this using manual exposure mode. Between the sky being very bright and the trees being relatively the dark, the exposure is fairly well balanced as a whole. It was shot in RAW so making adjustments like bringing up the shadows is very easy. Now, I use the masking tool in Lightroom to separate the shot into Sky and Not Sky. This lets me perform adjustments (exposure, highlights, shadows, color mixer, etc.) to one part of the photo without affecting other parts of the photo.

• The photo should be level. This isn't the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A little cropping and straightening is easy to manage in Lightroom. My new camera has a level gauge readout on the viewfinder making this kind of thing even easier to get right in the field.

• The crowds of people are realistic. However, they are also distracting. In 2015, I had no concept of the remove tool in Lightroom; I used Lightroom mostly as a RAW->JPG converter. Now, I use the removal tool all the time. In the past, I didn't use Photoshop at all. Now, it's not every photo but I use Photoshop for fixing blemishes that the Lightroom tool couldn't handle.