"It's Just a Spring Clean for the May Queen..."

I just looked and saw my last entry here was five months ago. I will admit I have been distracted by some great day job and family events, and it doesn't mean haven't been capturing happy snaps from that stuff - I post and manage those pictures over on Google Photos...their site and management tools are great for the 7000+ photos I have uploaded to them. And, despite not venturing out for any recent shoots, I recently spent some time in Lightroom to reevaluate, tweak, and organize all of the photos I had put in their cloud - this would explain why I quoted Led Zeppelin in the title.

It was a long due spring cleaning that happened in a summer month. 

I came away with four things from my exercise:

1. I have become more in tune with the myriad of individual variables the tool provides for tweaking. I was a fan of presets when I first started working with Lightroom as shortcuts to adjust a photo's colors, exposure, etc. I still sometimes use them as a starting point, but have definitely enjoyed fine tuning things with the specific controls until my eye is truly satisfied.
2. Speaking of my eye being satisfied, I also realized something as I was tweaking my previous tweaks on my photos - stepping away from the shots for a few months then revisiting them felt similar to something I do with my writing. Many times I will write and refine something to a semi-finished state, leave it alone for a gap of time, then review it again to see if my word and phrasing choices need any final polish...the delay gives me an almost fresh set of eyes when I revisit things.
3. Lightroom, like every other software package out there, now boasts it uses Artificial Intelligence to make masking and unwanted object removal even better. I put that claim to the test with the above shot of a sand dune on Navarre's beach and was pretty impressed. There were some footprints and other small anomalies in the sand wind ripples that have have magically disappeared!
4. Finally, and this was a hard one to push myself on - not every picture from a shoot that made the cut to be uploaded to Lightroom was a keeper. I am sure other photographers struggle with the idea of throwing out what may have once been seen as decent shots. It's never easy to toss out art you were a part of capturing, but having high standards is also a part of being an artist.