When I look through my own photos taken several years ago, I find that I like different images from those that I liked around the time when the photos were taken (I have a record of what I liked in the form of star ratings that I gave the photos in Lightroom). I think that this is, in part, because my tastes and preferences changed over the years. Daniel Gilbert, the author of “Stumbling on Happiness
”, explains that people tend to under-estimate how much they change throughout their lives. Looking at my ratings of the old photographs certainly confirms this, at least in my case.
Also, when we form impressions of events, our minds retain only a few key details and fill in the rest with plausible made-up stuff. As it happens (according to Gilbert, who cites references in psychology), we retain more objective details when we process the current events, relative to the events ether from the past (memories) or from the future (which are entirely made-up by our minds). This is an evolutionary safety mechanism – the present events the have immediate relevance have higher priority in terms of use of the processing power of our brains. Incidentally, this is why it makes sense to minimize distractions while doing creative or analytical work. There is a great example of this in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, where the main character argues that motorcycle mechanics, who listen to music at the repair shop, do inferior work.
Unconscious prioritizing of current events is also a reason to process and rate photos as soon as they are taken. There is a narrow time window, where our impression of the photographed events is most detailed and objective. After that windows has passed (or before the event has happened in the case of imagining the future), it is easy for us to subconsciously distort the reality of what happened, what we felt, and even what we saw. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but capturing the impression of the event immediately after it occurred is certainly valuable.
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