LATE FIND

Medicine Rocks at sunset, Montana 2020

Streamlining and maintaining my photo library is always an ongoing project, especially during winter time. Some of our images just beg to be processed and we publish them immediately, and that’s great. Others need some time before we discover the potential of the image. And last not least there are always photos, mostly older ones, that can’t hold the quality standards I have today and will just be treated with the delete key of the computer keyboard.

With today’s photo I go back to 2020. Medicine Rocks in eastern Montana was a mesmerizing place to pitch the tent and inhale the feeling of the beautiful Wild West. It has been a sacred place for native people since hundreds of years and it bothers me how some individuals disrespect the fact and carve, whatever they want, into the soft stones of Medicine Rocks. I usually never alter the context of my photos, but here I admit, the stupid carving of a name into the rocks was eliminated while processing the final image.

It was a beautiful evening and the setting sun put a nice glow on some rocks, while others were already in the shade. In one of my blog posts about Medicine Rocks from October 2020 I posted already a color version of this image. So this is clearly a “group 2” picture, because I needed some time to discover the potential for a black and white version. You may not agree but I like it actually better.

LIBRARY CLEAN UP

Mule Deer, Theodore Roosevelt NP

The year comes slowly but surely to an end and I use the evenings to tidy my 2015 photo archive. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC to organize my photo library since many years. It still feels good to find photos that have potential to be published, at least here in the blog. Beside that I always have some future projects in my head that need some time to grow and using “collections” in Lightroom helps me to shape them without changing the structure of the photo library. Everybody has probably a different way to organize their files. I prefer time folders (one for each month) and use keywords in order to find any photo later by its content. This sounds like a lot of work (it really isn't) but I believe for a wildlife photographer it is important to display all photos of a particular species with just one easy click. It allows to re-evaluate previous work and compare it to the results of the latest shooting session. For me this is essential to see if improvements were made, or to draw conclusions and prepare for the next time a critter or light situation present in front of the lens.