Small waterfall in Central Taiwan

If it hasn’t already happened to you, probably on numerous occasions, then it’s only a matter a time until it does. Something will get lost. Hopefully it won’t be an uninsured Phase One back or something equally pricey. It used to be that a film door would get opened before the film was properly rewound, or X-rays fogged the film when going through an airport that didn’t allow hand inspection. Today it’s more likely to be because of a failed hard drive that wasn’t backed up, or a memory card that gets formatted before the image files have been properly copied. It’ll happen, it’ll probably devastating at the time but you’ll deal with it and move on.

A few years ago, I was traveling through Tibet and shot some landscape images that featured a double rainbow in an otherwise cloudless sky, with the majestic Himalayas as the backdrop. Somehow, in the years since, those photographs have been lost. I still have all the other images from that trip just not the ones with the rainbow.

Earlier this year, my wife and I moved to a new apartment. While packing up my office at the old one, I came across a large box of slides, all of which are unscanned – 5000 or so in total. They’re still unscanned because I haven’t gotten hold of a slide scanner nor found the time to arrange one and do the scanning.

Just last week, upon installing Lightoom 3, I checked a couple of catalogs and compared them with the images in the folder on the drives. So far, I’ve discovered about 2000 images that had never made it into Lightroom 2. Some of them are duplicates but there are a few others in there that deserve a second look just as soon as I get a chance.

Sometimes things get lost and sometimes they get found.

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