I constantly challenge myself to improve my photography.  My own personal goal is to be able to look back every 3-6 months and know that my work is dramatically better than it used to be.  I try to push myself in every dimension: interaction in my portraits, technical settings on my camera, lighting, etc – basically anything that makes for a better final image.  Every once in a while, I like to go back to my old photos and take another look at how I processed the images.  I’m glad that I started shooting RAW images a long time ago, because there is so much more detail that the latest version of Lightroom can extract from those old files that would have been otherwise lost.  Here’s a two-shot panorama I took of downtown Minneapolis from Loring Park four years ago.  Originally, I processed it as an HDR and it probably took me an hour.  The HDR process left the lighting a little uneven and the image was noisy.  The image looked nice on the screen before, but now it has the detail I really want to see in a print.  And it was much, much faster to process – only about 10 minutes.