Building Bridges
While discussing the idea to work on a blog together we knew we wanted to document our life, our projects, and our travels. Most blogs document those things in chronological order as they happen. While I'm excited to share our future, I'm also excited to share highlights from our past. We (especially me) have a huge backlog of images from the last five years together. Plus the five years I was making photographs before I met Victoria. This post is the first of what will be a recurring series on our site. Photos from our archive.
My archive of over 60,000 photographs could benefit from a tighter organizational structure. A goal of mine over the next year is to catalog my entire library of images to the point that it is easily searchable. The work required to achieve this task is centered around proper file naming, keyword tagging, and adding metadata to images, such as titles and captions. This is a time-consuming and at times, a tedious task.
Another one of my goals is to share more images. I often struggle finding images to share despite having a 10-year-old archive. Conventional social media wisdom would have you believe posting your most recent content is best practice. I think you can gain a better understanding of a photographer's work by being exposed to photographs regardless of when they were taken. Image pairs can be created years apart. A project or body of work can take place over a number of years, even a lifetime. The ability to source images from my archive with little effort helps me focus on crafting a better story.
So where am I going with this? I'm a fan of what I call "piggybacking work." I like to take parts of different projects and make them work together to achieve a common goal. As I catalog my archive of images, I will be able to generate a steady stream of images to share. Win!
The first set of photographs I want to share feature bridges. This idea came about while Victoria and I were brainstorming how to share more of our work. She asked me what photos I would like to start with and I blurted out the word "bridges". After thinking about how to introduce these photographs I realized there was a connection with my "piggybacking process." Bridging the gap between goals is not an easy task, but I'm hoping this idea will be a jumping off point. Building bridges between goals starting with photographs of bridges.
