Examining old work and how it can be useful

Recently I've had to go back and look through some older work (like when I put this site together) and it got me thinking about what insight or perspective I can gain from it. When you've been doing anything creative for a while you'll begin to collect past efforts. And if you're like me you'll find yourself cringing at times. Even stuff that you thought at the time was good and were proud of. It's even worse when some of those images are out there and keep popping up. I almost wish I could pay them to take it down.
So what do we take from this? I choose to see it as all part of a long process. An education. It's training your eye. It's developing a personal style. Two of the issues I most often noticed was a lack of sharp focus and white balance looking off (I still struggle with these at times. If you do too you can comment below and I can give you some suggestions to fix them). There are several reasons I can attribute those to and what I've done more recently to combat them. 
Older work can be more useful even than glancing at it and see where we went wrong. When I've gotten in creative ruts or want to try a new editing style or process I'll go back through some photos that I liked at the time and re-edit them. Over time I've learned little tricks and methods of editing in Light Room that I may not have known at the time when I first edited it. There's also a lot of ways of playing with colors or turning a photo black and white that can totally change it's tone or make it come to life. Plus you're doing it strictly for yourself. You don't have to show it to anyone. There's no deadline. Overall, I've found this has been very helpful. Also I was able to take an image I had filed away and pulled it back out and made it into something I was even excited to share.  And even furthermore I have gone back through some shoots where I recall being disappointed with the outcome and found a photo or two I had totally overlooked. It was due to having a certain vision in my mind to capture something that I wasn't able to fully get so I wasn't satisfied. But over time once I got over that I was able to view it more objectively and say - "hey, yeah, I didn't get what I was after, but what I got isn't so bad." 

If this has been helpful at all to you, let me know by a like or comment. Thanks. 

Note about the photo featured above: I shot that in 2017 but put all those photos in a file and never posted them. I wasn't all that proud of them. It wasn't until my editor said she was looking for some epic Mardi Gras pictures for the 'Big Pic' (a 2 page spread) that I searched and found this one and thought it could work. It got used in this month's issue of DIG and it's now one of my most 'liked' pictures on my IG page.