Archives and Other Things

How do you organize almost ten years of digital photographs shot with five different cameras, four different brands? I sure don’t know but for ten years I have been plugging away at it and getting no closer to success.

If you back up and you revise an image on one drive, how to you sync it with the other drive—floppies, CD’s and DVD’s have long since lost any usefulness.

Anyway, when I run out of other things to do I try working on the “archives.” All of the early photographs from the Minolta and even for the first year of the Nikon were processed with a freebie software—can’t remember the name. But then Adobe bought the company and built Lightroom around the program. At the time it was one of the few non-destructive RAW converters available. It achieved that by writing the changes to a separate file that was referenced when you opened the original RAW images. Every time I saved the images to the computer it created three folders; one for the original RAW, under that folder there were two subfolders, one for the "changes" and one where it saved the "converted" or worked image. I saved everything in TIFF after it was worked but would still need to go back to the original RAW if I wanted to make changes. To look at my completed images meant that I had to drill down to the third file. Since I have this thing about Adobe, I purchased Nikon Capture NX when updates were no longer available for my freebie. What I have been doing, in order to save a little on disk space was going through some of the old files, merging the converted images back into the original folder and zapping the changes file—that got rid of two folders for every shoot.

In the process I came across this photograph of Janet taken in December 2006. It was a funny photograph even at the time it was taken. She had a new pink cap and she was modeling it for me. I think from the look on her face she was enjoying how silly she knew she looked in it. But the story of the cap was even stranger. You see Janet absolutely hated, with a purple passion, the color pink. She had made sure from day one that I understood that so that there would be no pink gifting ever. We were at the grocery store, can’t remember where we were trading at the time, Krogers I think, but they had this big cardboard display box sitting in the middle of the aisle and Janet decided that she needed one of these caps. They were gosh awful ugly. I probably mentioned that fact. I feel certain that I also reminded to her how much she hated pink—neither changed her mind so she came home with a pink cap. I believe in all the years that we were married this is the only time I ever knew Janet to buy anything that was pink, This may have been the one and only time that she ever wore it. You should have seen it from the side or back—oh so ugly. It would have made Jane Russell look like a dork and probably refroze all the snow Jane had melted in Alaska.
 
It’s nice to go back to some of the old photographs when she was her mischievous self, cracking crooked grins and making faces at my camera. I dearly loved her sense of humor.