We all have that “attic” on out hard drives that is just full of old stuff that we have not seen in a while, sometimes years even. When the weather is bad or there just is not anything going on that I want to photograph, I force myself to go to the attic and see what treasure and or trash might be lurking.

When I made the switch to Lightroom a few years ago, I abandoned my beloved file system for a straight store by date system. We can debate the merits of this later, it works really well for me, but it does hinge on using keywords as if your life depended on it. This is something that I had not done prior to LR and it meant that I had about 60,000 images that were now stored by date alone. YIKES! I am still, 2 yrs later, going through the attic of my images and deleting the junk and keywording the treasures.

I really was a hoarder of images when I started, I mean I never deleted an image. EVER! All of those blurry, legs chopped off, and 9 identical shot bursts were on my hard drive. Ugh! No matter how far software technology progresses, you don’t need to keep busted pictures. Deleting them is a liberating if not really dull experience. The upside of this and the reason I can force myself into the attic, is I have a better eye now and I have more software skills. I can find nuggets in there and that makes this project time worth spending.

The other reason to do this is that I need to get all of that stuff keyworded, so I it can be found later. I can still look at my images and recall when and where I took it. As my portfolio grows and my grey cells are overloaded, this is not going to be so simple. Getting the images out of the attic and in to the light with keywords will be very useful in the future.

When you are bored or there is nothing to photograph go in to your attic and get to work, you never know what you might find. Here are some images I re-discovered this week in my attic.

Drop me a note and let me see what you’ve discovered.

You can see all of my images and order prints if you would like…HERE.