Forgotten Photos and Organizing

I had a friend help me set up a server (well, really - he set up the server! Thanks, Thomas!) so now I can transfer the thousands of photos I have on hard drives to one place. 

If any of you are photographers reading this, you know what a completely hellacious task photo storage is. Labeling and cataloging files for storage is one of the least-loved tasks a photographer has. 

It's not fun. 

Interestingly, most photographers I know use Lightroom and almost no one knows how to use it well for cataloging and keeping track of photos.

I'm always asking other photographers, and other photographers are always asking me about that aspect of Lightroom. Mostly, we shrug our shoulders and do our best.

I have a Lightroom Bootcamp class cued up to watch and haven't had time. 

We're all good at using Lightroom for editing but when it comes to cataloging and storing it's complex and definitely not intuitive. 

So...here I am painstakingly moving files over every day. It's a slow and frustrating process, especially because I'd like to do a better job organizing on the server than I did with the hard drives, so it's taking me a while to reorganize. 

The nice part?

Once again, I'm going through lots of old photos and finding a few hidden gems here and there. 

The angel above is one of them. I forgot I took this because I was so caught up in editing my close-up city shots from this shoot. 

When I saw the angel yesterday, it brought tears to my eyes because I had just been talking to someone about a lot of the recent troubles in Atlanta. 

Cities in Crisis

I'm not going to get political on you here, because I hate politics. It's people that matter and I guess that turns on politics but my heart is broken thinking about some recent tragedies here in Atlanta.

There was a stabbing in Piedmont Park in which a young woman and her dog were both killed. 

Then there was a young woman kidnapped in front of the restaurant where she worked, and she was later found dead in a local park. My daughter knew her. 

As a human and especially a mother, I'm wrecked when I read or hear about these stories, and when my daughter said she knew one of the women, I had such a hard time not going to a dark place.

I think over and over about how those poor parents must feel right now. I think about how horribly the young woman died.

It's just senseless violence that leaves a family and community devastated. 

How can someone do something so horrific to another human being?

I can't answer that question but it seems to be happening with alarming regularity in all of our major cities. Or maybe it's just that social media and the internet make things so immediate. 

I never watch the news or I'd be too depressed to get out of bed. I remind myself it's all about the ratings and bad news sells.

That doesn't make those stories any less real. 

I recounted a story in a recent post about an attempted kidnapping in my own neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. What would these men have done if they'd successfully kidnapped the women? 

I can't even tell you how angry, frustrated, and powerless these things make me feel. 

So...

I remember seeing the angel and realizing I could frame her up in the photo with the city in the background. 

I liked the idea of an angel praying watch over the city and that was a couple of years ago when I took this. We need angels more than ever now.

We need more angels. 

See you between the raindrops.

xoxo,
Susan 

An Angel Watches Over