Recently, I was searching for a particular image I wanted to use in another project and I ran across an album of photos I took while on a trip to San Francisco with my wife. Now more than 15 years in the rear-view mirror, I’ll always remember that vacation as one of my all-time favorite getaways. Not only did Shani and I get to spend a whole week away from our growing family, (not as Mom and Dad, but as a couple) we also got to explore a “new to us” west coast destination on our own terms. Each day was a different adventure with unique sights, amazing food, and precious time spent together, just the two of us. And of course, I took a ton of photos.
As I was indulging in some personal nostalgia revisiting some of my favorite personal photos of all time, I noticed a large chunk of imagery from that week never made the light of day beyond the confines of my hard drives. You may be asking yourself, “What does that mean exactly? Don’t you share everything you shoot and edit?”
Nope.
I’ve followed the same post-processing routine for almost two decades now. After I finish culling, editing, keywording, and exporting my images from a shoot, I will further separate those photos into different folders that dictate where the finished images will ultimately end up. Downsized photos get sent to the “Google Photos Upload” folder, full sized exports are placed in the “Permanent Backup” folder, and a smaller subset of those get put in a “To Flickr” folder. The “To Flickr” images usually represent roughly ten percent or less of the overall shots I edit.
Once a day, over the next few months, I will cherry pick an image or two from the Flickr folder and upload them to my publicly visible photostream. This is my de facto determination of which photos I think are worth seeing by someone other than me. I’m not sure I can quantify exactly how I determine which photos aren’t “public-worthy,” but to borrow Justice Stewart’s feelings on obscenity, I know it when I see it.
But as I revisited my shots from that long past San Francisco trip, I started to notice a fair amount of shots that were deemed unworthy at the time that in the light of 2026, I actually kind of liked. For some of them, I could definitely see why they initially missed the cut: sharpness issues, unfortunate cropping, and questionable composition choices abound. And to be perfectly frank, based on the information in some of the EXIF data, I was still prone to making some significant mistakes with my technical settings from time to time. ISO 800 in daylight conditions? Oooof. But for all their flaws, some of these rejects still resonated enough to revisit.
I’m not sure how I missed their worthiness at the time. I know for a fact there were a ton of publicly uploaded photos from 15 years ago I definitely would not post today, so it can’t be that my standards have lowered. Maybe I’m just a little bit nicer to myself now than I was then. Unlikely, but a possibility.
Regardless, below are 27 previously unseen photos from my 2011 trip to the west coast. Are they the best shots from my trip? Nope, but they’re not bad. If you’re the type of person who likes takeaways from blog posts (honestly ewwww,) I guess my suggestion would be to revisit your archives every once in awhile. You never know what you might dig up. Maybe you’ll find some shots that may not be your favorites, but they might be someone else’s jam, and for that reason alone, they deserve to be seen.
Photo Gallery – San Francisco Leftovers
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