It's mid-July and somehow it's been overcast for a fortnight. I've spent most of this week indoors going through a backlog of photos from a trip I took in the spring, and I've come to a conclusion I probably already knew: I am a terrible editor of my own work.
Not technically. I can handle the sliders. I mean editorially - as in, deciding which shots are actually good, which need scrapping, and which ones I'm keeping for entirely sentimental reasons that have nothing to do with the image itself.
The Problem With Being There
When you take a photo, you remember everything around it. The light. The mood. The small victory of finally getting the angle right after twelve attempts. And all of that memory bleeds into how you see the image afterwards.
You look at a shot that's technically mediocre - slightly soft, horizon not quite level, the background a bit busy - and you still feel something about it because you were there. That feeling tricks you into thinking the photo is doing the work, when really your memory is doing it for you.
A stranger looking at the same image has none of that scaffolding. They see what's actually there. Which is sometimes a lot less.
Why Distance Doesn't Always Fix It
The standard advice is to wait. Come back to your photos after a week, a month. Fresh eyes and all that. And to be fair, it does help - I'm always more ruthless about old work than recent work.
But it doesn't fully solve the problem. Because even with a month's distance, you still know which shots were hard to get. You still remember the ones where everything came together in the moment. That knowledge doesn't disappear; it just fades a bit. You're still not seeing the image the way a viewer with no prior knowledge would see it.
And for competition work especially, that gap matters enormously. I wrote a bit about this when I was thinking through how subjective competition judging actually is - but even before you get to the judge's taste, you've got to survive your own.
The Specific Ways I Get It Wrong
I keep shots that are technically fine but compositionally dull because I like the subject. I dismiss shots that are compositionally interesting because the subject wasn't what I was going for. I over-process images that feel flat to me because I remember how vivid the scene was in person - and then I look at them later and they're clearly overdone.
That last one is the worst. Over-processing is a trap I fall into constantly, and I genuinely can't see it when I'm in the middle of an editing session. My eyes adjust. What looks saturated after ten minutes starts looking normal after thirty. It takes someone else - or something else - pointing it out.
This is actually where I've found Artsplainer genuinely useful in my Lightroom workflow. It's an AI artwork analysis app I built, and I added a Lightroom Classic plugin partly because I kept wanting a second opinion without having to export anything or ask a friend who'd feel obliged to be nice. You can run an analysis on an image without leaving your editing session - it flags things like blown highlights, distracting backgrounds, and yes, over-processing. It doesn't always get the nuance right, but it's a lot more honest than I am with myself.
It's not magic. It occasionally says something vague or misses the point of what I was going for. But it doesn't know I spent three hours getting that shot. And sometimes that ignorance is exactly what you need.
What Actually Helps
Aside from outside opinions - AI or human - the most useful thing I've found is changing the context in which I view the image. Print it small. View it as a thumbnail. Put it in a mock competition entry form. Show it to someone who can't be bothered to be diplomatic. Any friction that breaks you out of your usual editing environment forces you to see it differently.
I've also started keeping a "not yet" folder instead of deleting borderline shots immediately. Come back in three months. If I can't remember why I kept it, it goes. If I still feel something about it, I try to work out whether that feeling is coming from the image or from me. Honestly, I'm not always sure. But asking the question is at least a start.
The photographers I know who consistently produce strong work aren't necessarily the most technically skilled. They're the ones who've somehow got comfortable with being ruthless - with recognising that a photo either works or it doesn't, and that their feelings about the moment it captured are irrelevant to whether a stranger will stop scrolling.
That's a hard skill to build. But it might be the most important one.