Category: Photography

With only a couple exceptions, these are not what I consider to be my best photos posted to Instagram over the past year. Only 5 of them were actually taken in 2018; three are many years old, and one isn't even my own work. But what do I know?

…it's worth having the doggies drag me out of bed at the crack of dawn.

…Old Man in a Starbucks Bathroom (2018)

Still working on organizing 50 years of photos.

And it's making me realize I've taken a lot of shots I really like, (a few from 2008-2009 follow) but for some reason have never been posted, either here or on Flickr. I guess maybe at the time I didn't think they were that good, or perhaps required more Photoshop tweaking than I had skills for. Or maybe I was just lazy. But it's showing me that I miss making photos and really need to get my lazy ass out there again…

Many years ago, while out of work and undergoing radiation treatments for my cancer, I finally had enough free time on my hands to start a project I'd been wanting to undertake since the first flatbed scanner came into my life: digitizing the contents of my photo albums.

At the time, I really didn't have a system for organizing the photos, and over the years this has proven to be a huge problem. I had something like ten albums, so I simply named each photo with a sequential number based on which album was being scanned, followed by a short description that included the year. If there were multiple photos of a single event, I'd append an "a" or "b" to the end.

During the years that followed the initial completion of the project, that convention completely fell apart when I stopped printing photos and putting them into albums. Adding to the confusion was the fact that sometime around 2006, I'd purchased a new scanner that could digitize slides. The slide scans (of already scanned photos) were far and away better quality than the corresponding photos, but I made no attempt whatsoever to integrate them into the existing naming sequence, simply naming them scan1, scan2, etc.

After my dad passed, I got hold of his family photo albums and scanned all those photos into the mix. His albums were roughly organized by year, so in the interest of simply getting it done, I took advantage of that rough organization and threw the newly-scanned images into yearly folders. Unfortunately I made no attempt to properly name any of them, opting instead of a generic album name 001, 002, etc. At some point thereafter, I went back and moved all my photos into those yearly folders as well, since there was no reason to keep them separate.

The other day I was trying to locate a particular photo I knew existed in the collection, but after spending the better part of an hour coming up empty handed no matter what search parameters I put in, I knew the time had come that something had to be done about the hot mess that this photo collection had become.

I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize how bad it was. There were exact duplicates in the same folders with different names. There were duplicates with different names and years in different folders. There were the hundreds of scanxx photos, and I soon realized this was probably going to be a weeks-long (if not months-long) project getting this disaster organized.

Add to that I've been sitting on a dozen or so of my mom's family albums that are waiting to be scanned. My sister keeps asking if I've gotten around to doing it, and I keep putting her off, not wanting to wade into that without first organizing the mess I already had.

So the other day I created monthly folders in each yearly folder and started moving those items I had either previously named with a month, or knew with relative certainty happened at a particular time.

This time, my naming convention is year-month-numerical sequence-short description (where needed). In other words, 1989-06-0046-kevin ohm at sf pride.jpg. Fortunately Adobe Bridge has a batch rename function that allows me to do everything except the description automatically.

Even with that automation tool (and PhotoSweeper to weed out duplicates), at approximately 32,000 photos, this isn't going to happen overnight, but it is forcing me to rediscover a lot of photos I'd completely forgotten about.

The Moon, Venus, and Mars putting on a show in the western sky tonight.

Why, THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA, of course! Duh!
Gotta love Target and how they give a big stiff middle corporate finger to the wailing Christopaths.

It originally belonged to my mom. She gave it to me—or should I say she allowed me to start using it when I was 13 years old. It used large format 620 film, something that was becoming harder and harder to find even back then, but which had the potential for producing some amazing photos—even if you were limited to a maximum of 8 shots per roll. But I didn't know or care anything about that. I was just beginning to get into astronomy at the time, and what fascinated me the most about this camera was the fact that you could leave the shutter open indefinitely, allowing you to create photos of star trails. Of course, it involved a lot of trial and error and I never really did succeed in getting the effect I wanted from those pictures, but it planted the seed that was to grow into a lifelong love of photography.

I still have the camera, even though it hasn't been used for at least thirty years. It was supplanted by a Pentax 35mm in the 1980s and that was replaced when I went digital about ten years ago. I'd imagine I could get some nice coin for it now, but I can't seem to part with it—not just because it belonged to my mom, but also because it has so many good memories attached.

I've been using Flickr for the last twelve years or so. It started out as as a way for me to showcase and share my "serious" photography—i.e., only the images I'd shot with my DSLR.

But then a couple years ago I dumped the entire contents of my Instagram account in there along with photos I'd captured on various phones and even uploaded a large but undetermined number of scanned photos from my days of shooting film.

In short, it had become a hot mess.

I knew that by throwing the phone and Instagram photos into the mix there would undoubtedly be duplicates created, but I kept trying to convince myself that there would only be "a few" and their presence in the collection would concern no one other than my own anal-retentive self.

So of course I had to do something about it.

And it turns out that thanks to a few different online scanners, I learned there were significantly more than just "a few" duplicates in the collection. In some cases, there were multiple copies of the same photo. Unfortunately, while the various scanners were able to identify the duplicates, they were powerless to actually tag the photos for later removal. I don't know if Flickr's APIs changed after the services went online or what exactly happened, but the scanners (all of them) were unable to actually apply the tags so I could easily locate the dupes and delete them en masse.

Adding to this nightmare was the fact that the number of albums I had organized my photos into had become unwieldy and the groupings no longer made any sense. Initially I had organized everything by type, i.e. "Denver Downtown." But then, in order to easily share newer photos with friends and family via links, I started dumping photos into event albums, i.e. "Phoenix Downtown 11-12-2015."

Friday afternoon I discovered a very easy way to download everything in my Flickr account. You head to your camera roll, highlight the photos and videos you want, click on Download, and Flickr will spit out a Zip file. (Flickr says this function allows you to "download thousands of photos and videos at once," but in reality it limits each individual zip file to approximately 500 images and will create multiple Zips.) I had my camera roll set up to show everything by date taken, so it was a simple matter to highlight each year's worth of photos into a single (or in a couple cases, multiple) Zip files.

Once I did that, I unzipped the files and ran the lot through PhotoSweeper to cull the duplicates (there were approximately 300 out of 4300 total photos). I then made a copy of the "clean" set of photos onto an external hard drive just in case and I went back to Flickr and used the same process to highlight the photos again. This time, instead of choosing download, I selected delete. Within a very short time, my Flickr page was a blank slate.

Since there was also no logic to the way I had initially named my photos, this process gave me the opportunity to assign some consistency to the new, duplicate-free collection of photos. For the sake of simplicity, I named everything YYYY-xxxx, where YYYY was the year and xxxx was a sequential number starting at 0001 for the first photo shot that year. At some point after everything is uploaded new (it should be finished by the time I publish this post) I'll go back and add something more descriptive in the description field of each image, but with 4300 photos, that isn't going to happen overnight.

I also realize that this purge has probably broken hundreds of links on this here website thingie itself, because for a while I was merely linking images to Flickr to conserve disk space. But at this point I just don't care. My Flickr account was a disaster and needed to be cleaned out.

I still don't have any idea how I'll ultimately organize the photos. By Event or by Type? Events nested by Type? Do I even bother putting things in albums any more?