Creative Photography: Giving Old Images a Second Life

Ever fall in love? It’s glorious, like your brain gets hijacked by a romantic comedy, and you don’t even think about calling the cops. I’ve been there more than once, and for me, that dizzy, can’t-focus, “all I think about is you” stage lasts about two years. Knowing this about myself, I long ago set a rule: every romance gets a two-year probation before I rearrange the furniture.

This image was made years before its haiku, then brought back to life after I reconnected with the “love of my life” from my much younger days. Decades later, I fell head-over-heels again, proof that muscle memory is a real troublemaker. But time changes people. Eighteen months in, the logical part of my brain, which had been quietly sipping tea in the corner while my heart tossed glitter in the air, finally cleared its throat. We weren’t the peaceful, ride-into-the-sunset couple I’d imagined. The magic was real, but so was the neon sign in my head pulsing: Abort Mission.

Still, I can say I had the experience. I reconnected, saw it through, and, like any artist who refuses to admit defeat, I dusted off an old idea, gave it a makeover, paired it with a haiku, and learned that when love leaves glitter, you’d better have a broom.

[ Three Stages of Transformation ]

The craft behind this image is less about shooting or gear and more about revisiting an old idea through post-processing.

It began as a simple brown leaf (image #1), photographed on a shooting table with ambient light in 2009. Back then, I’d gone out looking for materials for an autumn still life when this leaf caught my attention. Heart-shaped, with an almost perfect hole in the top left, not dramatic, but it had character, and I knew it was worth keeping, and so it stayed in my Lightroom catalog.

Soon after capture, I gave it a quick round of post-processing, warming the tones and tidying a few small distractions (image #2), then tucked it away, awaiting its moment. My catalog serves as a kind of personal clip-art scrapbook, a vault of visual ideas waiting for the right project. This leaf waited there for years, until 2018, when I recalled its shape and knew it would perfectly accompany a haiku I’d written after the breakup mentioned above. I titled it Inevitable.

The final version (image #3) was all about the idea I’d pre-visualized from the start. In Photoshop, I shifted the leaf to a rich crimson with a hue/saturation adjustment, overlaid a subtle textured background, and made minor tweaks to contrast and edges. When it was done, it carried exactly what I wanted it to: a mix of love, change, and letting go. Lightroom is where ideas like this wait patiently—my trusted clipbook, holding visual seeds until the right moment arrives to bring them to life.