For some reason whenever I poke around in my image library without any real intention, some random thought just pops in my head that I would normal never think about. Of course that usual means a blog post will emerge next. I was looking through my landscape images thinking about which ones I wanted to make a print of and it occurred to me that I had forgotten when and where I had taken some of the images I was looking at. This made me wonder what else I had forgotten about the images I hadn’t processed yet.
As time goes on the natural progression of a photographer is to keep shooting and to keep building that library. Having more images to tell the stories that come up in life is important, it’s also how we stay in business. Remembering all those stories is the hard part.
Now you may be wondering if it were these black and whites that stumped me into my original confusion and they didn’t. They just seemed the proper way to illustrate my point. As if removing the extra information will lead to the answer.
In the end I don’t know of anyway to remember every image, or what it was like shooting everything that I have. That’s what the photos are supposed to be reminders of. I wonder if in the end that’s how every image is. For only the photographer knows the whole story and if he’s not around to tell it then we are left guessing. It’s our imaginations job to fill in the blanks when we take a photo and when we are looking at someone else’s.