Remember when you started really focusing your interest on photography? Everything was exciting and new. You didn’t know what you didn’t know, so you felt free to ask questions and find answers. Everything you saw was a subject and quite possibly would end up in your images.

Do you still feel that same excitement and energy for your photography? Are you still keeping your camera with you at all times?

If not, one way to reignite your spark for photography and keep the excitement alive is to track your improvement. You will be amazed at the changes.

Go back through your images from a year ago or even six months ago. If you’ve been diligently practicing with your camera, studying photography greats, and investing time into improving your craft, you won’t be sorry and you will see the results in your final images.

I will warn you though. The moment you go back through your images from a year or six months ago, you may cringe a bit. While you may still love the subject or location, you’ll see things that used to be invisible to you. Perhaps it’s the lighting or shadows you notice more, maybe the grain or way you processed the image, perhaps the pose or angle. Whatever the issue or maybe all of the above, you’ll marvel at the fact that you didn’t see these things before, but they were there all the time.

Hence, the beauty and power of reviewing past images. See where you’ve been, take inventory of where you are, and set some goals for where you’d like to be in the near future. I promise it’ll be an enlightening experience!

In view of that idea, I’m posting a few of my recent images I had reviewed for my portfolio. These were images we shot for an aspiring model to create her modeling portfolio. I’m sure I’ll see them differently in six months, but when compared to my work a year ago, I’m thrilled with the changes I see.