Where Images Go

It is good to be back! First, an update.  As some readers of this blog may know from my last post, I recently had  a retinal tear and ocular hemorrhage.  I have improved significantly.  The acuity of my vision has improved dramatically and has essentially normalized.  I still have some 'floaters' that are irritating in that they move in and out of my visual field but one gets used to it and moves on....... So, I have been thinking quite a bit lately about what happens to all the images we take. Where do they end up?  Sure, I have printed a good number of what I initially considered my favorite shots.  But I also have many good images from workshops that I have attended, images from my local forays to natural areas around my home, and various interesting 'experimental images'.  And where do these all live?   Unprocessed on my hard drives!  What good do they do there, especially unprocessed?

I am not advocating spending time on sub-optimal images.  However, it is clear that photographs that might not qualify as 'best ofs' might be wonderful images as part of a themed photo project or body of work.  Likewise, there are plenty of photos that might not be destined for wall hanging but could nonetheless be important to a larger project.

Not to get too dramatic, but if they are not put 'out there' they might never be seen by anyone.

For these reasons, I have been spending some time thinking how various images that are disparate in some ways might, nonetheless, be grouped together.  For example, the keywording on my hard drive has images grouped by the workshop or location that they were taken in. It is quite possible that a one week workshop in New Hampshire might not have yielded enough good images to produce a location based project or folio.  However, by removing the idea of location, it is quite possible that some of these images could find themselves in a theme based project such as waterfalls, fall color, or reflections.  By simply regrouping them, many more options for using the images become evident.

Since I started thinking about this, a very interesting essay came out on The Luminous Landscape website about project or theme based photography that is definitely worth a read.