After reading the last post, you might have started thinking about past projects you’ve had photographed. Maybe you went back into your files, and you had a nice trip down memory lane...and maybe you even rediscovered some past projects that could be useful for your media efforts. (It happens to us as well!). When you’re considering using photos from past projects in your media work, there are a number of things you should be asking yourself:

What photos do you have?

In an ideal world, you’d look back and find that you had all the images you thought you had, in the formats you want, and easily accessible. If you were able to do this, bravo! If not...you might want to think about how you (and others in your firm) can get to those images easily. We recommend putting all your image files that might be used for publication work in one common folder tree on whatever you’re using for shared storage, because it’s way faster and easier for someone to use image browsing software to just look down the tree and see what’s there. There are plenty of tools out there to make image browsing easy; we’re fans of Phase One’s Capture One. If you’re an Adobe Creative Suite (or Photoshop) subscriber, you can do this with Bridge or Lightroom; the tools included with Windows and macOS also do a decent (albeit often slow) job.

Resolution: yesterday’s “print” is today’s “web”

Besides making sure you have the photos, you’ll want to make sure you have the photos in a resolution you can use. Over the last few years—thanks to the proliferation of retina screens, high-resolution cellphone displays, and 4K+ monitors—what counts for “web resolution” has changed a lot. A decade ago, we were shipping “web res” images at about 1024x768, and “print” images at about 3000x2400.  If you have print-resolution images from years past, you’ll have enough resolution for today’s website and social media use. If you have web-resolution images from years past, look at the image information closely, as you might need to relicense full-resolution images for things to look their best.

If you have full-resolution images, you have a lot of flexibility because you can crop and resize those images down to whatever size you need. We’ll be putting together a quick video on cropping soon if you’re not familiar with the process.

What photos don’t you have?

It’s common practice for photographers to produce many more photos than you actually use. On a residential project, we might produce 50-60 images, but most awards entries and a lot of other media work take 8-15 images per project. Your needs now are probably not the same as they were when you first licensed images from the shoot. If you’re looking at a set of images and going “surely, we photographed more than this!?”...chances are, you’re right! Give us a shout and see if we have more images available that you can license.

Can your old photos look better?

Technology marches on, and that includes the tools we use for processing images. Since we photograph everything as “raw” images, it often happens that if you ask your photographer for a fresh set of images and you have specific things in mind (i.e. “brighten everything up”, “tweak the colour balance”, etc). you’ll get better results from old images simply because we can apply new tools to them. Styles evolve and fashions change, particularly when it comes to how we photograph and process interior scenes. For example, we photographed this interior five years ago. What we shipped originally was this:

A quick few clicks of the mouse—to upgrade the “processing engine” to take advantage of five years worth of upgrades—gets us to this:

You’ll notice that among other things, the side balconies have brightened up and have more consistent colour, and the shadows look a bit more “airy”. The colours around the dining area and kitchen are also looking better.

Giving a nod to the current trend of neutral-heavy interior colour palettes—combined with better postproduction tools, we get to this:

This can make it possible to have a much more “fresh” looking view of an old project without you—or us—having to do much work at all. 

What happens after it’s photographed?

Photo day is but one day in the life of your project. While the lifecycle of commercial projects can be far shorter than we’d all like, the lifecycle of residential and institutional projects is often much longer. It’s possible that you’ve ended up with an old project that has changed and grown—for better or for worse—over the course of the years. It’s a rare pleasure to return to do old projects: we’re awaiting photographing a kitchen in a house that we’ve photographed three renovations in. Seeing what’s changed and what’s stayed the same can be an interesting part of the story—and can also lead to more work and happier clients for you. 

Next, I’ll talk about some tips and tricks in having old projects (re)photographed.