Working the mullock heap

I'm very fortunate to have done an amazing amount of travelling over the years and particularly in the last two years so I have never been short of photo opportunities although nowadays I make a big effort to  restrict the number of photos I take.I am not a fan of"chimping"-reviewing a photo on the LCD screen on the camera immediately after it has been taken-and prefer to look at photos on a big screen before deciding their fate.

About two years ago I persuaded myself that the best way to handle the photos from a trip was to download them using Lightroom and then to sit down and vigorously cull them-deleting all the non star quality photos- in the week after a trip.I then put the starred photos up on the blog and into photobooks and perhaps enter one or two into photo competitions.
I quickly realised that this "take no prisoners" approach meant that I was permanently deleting photos which I may well have second thoughts about later.So now I cull all the obviously flawed photos and identify the obvious stars in the first review and come back to the folder a few weeks or months later and look at the photos again to see if any "gems" are there amongst the dross.It's a bit like fossickers who work through the mullock heaps (waste tailings) of gold mines looking for the tiny nuggets of gold that the miners missed.
Adopting this technique yesterday evening on the photos from my trip to Austria/Germany and Italy back in June threw up the four photos below which I had previously passed over.They are the sort of photos I take whilst walking around to keep my eye in and they look so much better in black and white.None of them will win a photo competition but they are just fun.
All taken with the Leica X1 and B&W conversion done in Silver EFX Pro.