{"id":3178,"date":"2013-11-14T08:23:50","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T08:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=3178"},"modified":"2013-11-06T18:26:19","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T18:26:19","slug":"oh-so-easy-to-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=3178","title":{"rendered":"Oh, So Easy to Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If I hadn’t come back to review the pictures I made of\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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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.\u00a0 Active is the selected work that I put on My London Diary<\/a> and other web sites and which I keep as full-size jpegs on my internal and external hard disks.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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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. <\/p>\n

More in Egypt For & Against Muslim Brotherhood<\/a> 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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