PARSING THE ARCHIVES

"Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives."
                                                       - Annie Leibovitz

A rhum shop on St Martin

Every once in a while I have to make a lame attempt at organizing my photographic archives. Having tens of thousands of raw files -- plus any of those which have been duplicated and/or edited --It usually goes well for the first few hours, but then segues into doing something with a shot I'd forgotten about or I find some other way to occupy my time. I rather suspect it's similar to editing a novel while combatting ADD at the same time.

But it needs to be done on a fairly regular basis, which I admit to doing only very haphazardly. 

My photographs are maintained in three ways: on a computer -- currently a Mac G5 we have in a room we have dubbed "The Middle Room" even though we only have two such rooms in the house. Second bedroom is a much more accurate description -- the actual operational "office" is located in what was a former dining room, the table and chandelier from which have been moved to what would have been our Living Room. 

Clear as mud?

Menu of the Angel Diner, Wisconsin

Anyway. A large section of my archives are stored in the G5. Copies of those files are also spread amongst some six external hard drives in everything from their original Raw File form to fully edited portfolio works. 

A relatively small number of active files are in our iMac in the office, and another large set are burned onto CDs.

Kids in a fountain, Puerto Rico

In my time working with digital, which I began noodling with in 2004 during a trip to Florida, I have only lost two sections -- a painful and irritating lesson. The Grand Canyon and a section of photographs of Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta have gone missing. I still have some of the edited shots from those trips, but the raw archives are somehow missing. 

(I have the feeling they were on an external drive that committed suicide a few years ago -- but unfortunately the drive was so completely demolished not even a data-retrieval company could save the images.)

So now, everything is stored in triplicate if not more.

End of the day, Long Beach

As with any photographer, there are shots I'm embarrassed at having taken -- the quality or the subject matter or the execution....doesn't matter. It's not a great shot, so while I keep it in the archives, the photo will never see the light of day. Even the experiments -- a few years ago I was playing with time exposures and light streaks. A few of the shots turned out okay -- the New York Cab ride in the rain seen here may not be your cup of tea, but I think it's a cool shot -- while others are simply "not good".

California Coast

But while parsing the archives and trying to beat them into submission may not be a terribly fun or creative endeavor, it's a necessary evil. And it IS fun to uncover some images you'd forgotten about, rekindling the memory of that particular adventure.

The images in this column are such shots. Recent "finds" which I hadn't so much forgotten about but neglected to remember.

If that makes any sense at all. It's O'Dark Thirty. You try making sense during your first cup of coffee...

A Tuesday night on Duval Street, Key West