If I hadn’t come back to review the pictures I made of protesters opposite the Egyptian embassy in early October for this blog post, there are a dozen or so of my images I might never have seen again. It perhaps would not have been a great loss, because none of them are great images, not even among my own best images, but it reminded me of how easy it is to lose digital images.
They wouldn’t have been entirely lost. At the moment I still keep (and try to back up) all of the raw files I shoot, except for those which are really technically hopeless or terminally unseen. I don’t keep those I take by accident when I grab hold of the camera carelessly and hit the shutter release or stick my elbow on it when I sit down (well, I might if that random process ever produced an interesting image.) Or where for some reason I completely missed what I was trying to photograph. But I still keep the near misses, the images I make when I’m working my way to what I want and all the rest that are decent. A few years back I was asked for pictures of an incident in connection with a court case, and those that were most relevant were just those kind of images, which had I only kept the most successful would have been deleted.
But that full set is a dead or at least dormant, something I’m unlikely to look through again unless something special like that request for evidence comes up. Active is the selected work that I put on My London Diary and other web sites and which I keep as full-size jpegs on my internal and external hard disks. Some of it is also stored externally, in the archives of the several libraries that occasionally sell my work, and a much, much smaller amount in digital or print form in other collections.
I select my work in Lightroom, giving a 2 star rating to those that will end up in that active collection. Some other images – including near duplicates of those images – get a single star. Then the images that I send to Demotix or elsewhere, all of which should be ‘2 star’ images, get an additional colour rating, using a different colour for each story on a particular day. LR has 5 available colour labels, yellow, green, blue and red. And purple, but purple is a pain as there is no hot key for it (Adobe uses 0-5 for stars and 6-9 for colours – and apparently couldn’t think of another hot key – perhaps Ctrl+7 would be useful – and why not let us have 3 more colours on Ctrl+6, 8 and 9.) Fortunately I seldom have more than 4 stories for a single day.
When I want to write out a set of images for My London Diary and for the jpeg collection, I select them by the 2* rating. Which is usually fine, but just occasionally – as for this protest – I’d managed to give the best images a blue rating but to not assign them to 2* (or more likely to somehow remove the 2* rating from them all, though I can’t find any way to do this on a whole batch in LR.) So when I selected the pictures to write, I got only the three that hadn’t been selected to send to the agency rather than the whole 15.
It was a fairly long and slightly confusing day for me, and at the Egyptian embassy I found not one protest but two. Opposite the embassy were the supporters of the deposed President Morsi, and a few yards down the road a smaller group who had come out in support of the army who had deposed him. So it perhaps isn’t surprising that I didn’t notice a fairly small group of images was missing. But coming back to write about the protest for >Re:PHOTO it was obvious.
There were interesting differences between the two protests, and of course the posters and placards were very different as you can see. I felt rather more welcome at the protest supporting the removal of Morsi. It was a smaller protest and easier to move around and take pictures.
More in Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood which must be one of the longest web pages I’ve written, with the newly added images making a total of 35 on the page, roughly twice the normal number I aim for. Thank goodness for broadband.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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