Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2013 - 8

From the
Farm

Text and photos by Elizabeth Hunter

What are Photos For?
One thing they’re for, upon looking back, is showing you
“what’s beautiful to your eyes and heart.”

imagine buying a new house – not just
new to you, but brand new – and instead
of sorting through your old house’s contents and deciding what to keep and
what to throw away, you just moved
everything into the new one, down to the
dust balls under the bed, the ashes in the
stove and the trash in the wastebaskets.
No one in her right mind would do that.
But last summer when I bought a new
computer, I did the equivalent, when I
learned, with relief, that the sellers could
transfer everything from my old computer onto the new one instead of my
having to figure out how to do it.
“Great,” I said. “Go ahead.”
So they did.
Which meant, among many other
things, that my new computer’s photo
program was saddled with four years of
accumulated photographs from my digital camera. When I’d first switched from
film to digital, I’d made a stab at editing
the photos I’d shot after I downloaded
them and made a stab at naming the
files. For awhile I’d even labeled the individual photographs. But I’d long since
stopped. How many photographs had I
accumulated in four years? The number
was shocking: more than 14,000 pictures
that the computer had organized into
roughly 500 files it characterized as
“events.” The events weren’t events at
all, but were named by the computer for
the dates I’d shot the photos. What a
mess!
Because I take photographs for business as well as pleasure, even in the age
of film I took more photos than most.
Still, since I had to pay for processing, I
thought twice before clicking the shutter.
When I picked up the developed film, I
went through the pictures immediately,
tossing the out-of-focus or repetitive
ones, then labeling the envelope holding
the remaining with date and subject, and
storing it with others in a series of shoeboxes. But freed of financial restraint by
digital photography, I became profligate,
8 | BlueRidgeCountry.com

BRC
Click to see more of Elizabeth’s favorite photos
Photos to keep: a glory of gloriosa daisies; a barred owl’s steady stare; a brightly colored
brown-hooded owlet moth caterpillar feasting on spent aster leaves in late fall.

shooting five or 10 shots of, say, the mist
rising from the river on a glistening morning after a night of rain, five or 10 more
of leaves emerging from buds on the
Virginia creeper vine wreathing my back
porch. Then, the next day, another five or
10 of the same thing. I downloaded photos from camera to computer every so
often; sometimes I clicked through the
downloaded shots to take a look.
Occasionally I named a file. But often I
was busy with something else and did
neither.
True, my new computer had enough
memory capacity to store a seemingly
infinite number of photos; I didn’t need
the space the 14,000 were taking up. But
I also could not find photos I wanted or
needed that I was sure I had. And as year
followed year, I forgot what I did or
didn’t have. So on the relentlessly sodden
days that characterized the summer of
2013, I decided to slim down and orga-

nize photo files.
To keep the task from being too onerous, I set myself an extremely modest
goal: delete a minimum of 100 photos
every day until you’ve got organized,
manageable files. At this pace, a friend
pointed out, I might finish by my 100th
birthday. And, since I hadn’t stopped taking pictures, the files were bound to
expand again. Nevertheless, I kept on.
It was immediately apparent that
organizing by something other than date
needed to precede editing. If, in the
future, I needed photographs of the river
in flood, I ought to create a file with that
name and move every flood picture to it,
regardless of what year or month the
floods occurred. A file named “Cats” was
a no-brainer. My files were liberally sprinkled with photos of Esme and Fiona in
front of and behind the wood stove, on
the couch, asleep in a favorite chair. Since
I write about gardening, I needed files on

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Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2013

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