I’m sure I’m not the only one who keeps tons of old photos in my camera roll, thinking, “I should do something with these someday.” What, I’ve never been sure, although in the past year or so, while doing some digital decluttering, I have come up with some ideas.
- Photos that have flaws, but still inspire me can be used as reference photos for art! I began documenting this process in the post What to do with those old sunset photos? Paint ’em! You can find these photos dotted throughout the site, largely on “Photo to Painting” posts.
- Photos that I actually think are good go on my Unsplash! I’ll cop to using Unsplash like a fancy Instagram; I like being able to look down my roll and see a jumble of colors, seasons, and vibes.
- Photos of public places can be submitted to Google Maps, especially those that demonstrate the beauty and charm of a local outdoor area or which may help others navigate someplace.
I will grant that generally these uses make my photos subject to becoming AI fodder, which I’m not thrilled about, but that’s the cost of making them available to other humans.
My campaign to begin actually painting my old photos has been moderately successful. Since I began in August 2023 (1.5 years ago), I have resurrected and painted 12 archival (6+ months old) photos that otherwise would have languished in my camera roll.
- 3 in What to do with those old sunset photos? Paint ’em!
- 1 in Sunset Photos Part 2: More Mauve!
- 3 in Photo to Painting: December Late Foliage & Winter Sunsets
- 1 in Should I paint while looking at a reference photo?
- 3 in Photo to Painting: October Skies
- 1 in November 2024 Photo to Painting
But although the “Photo to Painting” series was started to take on archival photos, from the second post, it shifted to primarily focus on recently-taken photos. It is just too hard to keep up with archival photos when there is always something new!
Something I’m learning in my Sky of the Day project is that there is a new sky every day. I know, shocking. But I’m rarely going back to the Sky Archives (arskyves?) when there are current day’s skies to be painted! A recently-taken photo carries with it an intense memory of the real event, but over time those memories fade. It’s harder to include in your painting the emotion and intangibles that a photo can’t capture when the photo is all you have.
The good news is that there is an inexhaustible supply of inspiration. The bad news is that I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to painting my archive.
For that reason I have decided to give myself a bit of a clean break and post some of the highlights of my “Painting Possibilities” album backlog so they are somewhere. Once they’re posted, I’ll know I can go back to this page and find and paint any of them, but should my attention continue to be fixed on incoming photos, I can also let them go, safe in the knowledge I have “done something” with them.
18 photos from 2024
The weird incursions of baseball lights, especially at the side, make this an odd photo, but I just love the sunset sky gradient and clouds.
This cloud is even better! Captured right at the moment when the red-pink underglow is most intense as the sun sinks below the horizon. In real life, this appeared more hot-pink and less red-orange.
Actively falling snow! It’s hard to capture white snow on a background of a white sky, but you can see the flakes against the darker background of trees and reeds at the lower right.
I’d probably paint the snow here as thicker, whiter, and less full of melty holes, but I love the cleanness of the white snow against a crisp blue sky, and the feathery cirrus clouds are lovely. Not sure how I would do that; paint around them wet-in-wet, or paint a flat blue sky then do a second layer later of wet-in-wet white gouache?
I just love the color palette here which was pretty close to accurate (surprisingly, considering the phone turns most of my sunset photos orange). Grayish lavender, hot coral pink, and golden yellow were the colors I really saw. I also love the heavy upper cloud which has interesting little gaps of light.
I just think this is a beautiful and evocative golden hour/early sunset photo, not as garishly golden as some of them, just a nice play of light and dark as the heavy cloud covers the sun but the upper clouds are still caught in its golden light. I like how you can see some ray action at the bottom of the heavy cloud.
I had thought this ironic photo of the glowingly beautiful blooming serviceberry outside my bathroom window could be a companion piece the one I painted of the same viewpoint showing fall foliage in October 2023, but I was too intimidated to try to paint white blossoms.
This photo is very busy with all the deciduous trees, but I absolutely love the colors of the smooth sunset gradient, which are close to accurate: muted pastel blue to lilac to grapefruit pink.
Another sunset view from the same night. Similar colors, but this one has some interesting features like cloud streaks, gray cumulus clouds over the wispy colorful stratus clouds, and the silhouette of someone walking a dog. I also like the overall composition in which most of the frame is the heavy lavender-gray, which really offsets the streaks of coral pink.
The sky looked pinker in real life. But either way, I really liked the way the eerie pinkish-gold light peered through the heavy, slate-colored clouds.
This photo is notable not for its beauty but for its personal meaning: it shows literally every possession my partner and I owned at this point, after moving cross country with only luggage. It has been a lifelong dream to become this minimalist, but in retrospect, I don’t recommend it.
I adore this streak of golden cloud. I was overall disappointed by the sunsets in BC which struck me as being less vibrant than those in MA, but sometimes they could be sublime in their own way. You can also see the mountain in the background, distantly; I like the way the sky begins to turn a soft pink and the mountain looks so light-colored, just a solid pastel blue-violet shape, with atmospheric perspective.
Me birding in Vancouver. The greens are so green!
Such strange clouds! I featured this photo in I don’t know the types of clouds and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
I have family members who live on this extremely gorgeous island. The weather is always great here, and the views are interplays of crisp blue sky, fluffly clouds, distant blue mountains, seas reflecting the sky, deep spruce greens and vibrant vegetation.
I liked the contrast between the brightness of the green grass and sky and the alluring darkness of the shadowed part of the path.
This is just the type of glowingly yellow autumn tree I love to paint. You can find a lot more of my October highlights in the paintings I did paint contemporaneously: Photo to Painting: October Trees, Photo to Painting: October Skies, and Photo to Painting: Late October Trees.
The one time I was up in time for sunrise! I found the colors prettier in real life; the camera warmed the violets of the clouds and made the pink streaks too scarlet.
I can’t resist a coral cloud! This would be a good candidate for using diluted Venetian Red.
You can find more of my unpainted reference photos in these posts: