My mum asked if I could share photos that I have of her.

Hello, 40 000 untagged photos.

The task seemed overwhelming so I put it off for many months. Today I thought I’d have a go at skimming through a subset at least. In the end I scrolled through all twelve and a half years of photos that I have in Lightroom in a couple of hours. After a while I found patterns that made the work easier – I could easily spot longer trips that I could quickly skim past because I knew she wasn’t there, etc. (And then had to do it all over again because I misunderstood a Lightroom sync setting and lost all my choices and this specific action, of all things, did not have an Undo possibility. The second time was even faster.)

I could definitely prune some of that. In the early years, when I was new to photography, and the kids were squirmy and wiggly, I often took many photos in the hope that some would be OK, and then kept more than I really needed. I wasn’t even photographing daily, then, so the output of each “session” must have been even larger. The kids sit still these days, so I don’t need to spray and pray any more. On the other hand, now I can take ten or twenty shots of the same flower, with only minor variations. I try to be better at culling them afterwards, but sometimes I don’t have the energy for that effort.

2021 was clearly a bad year for photography. And for life. I’m still not living like I was before the pandemic; I go out less and undertake fewer projects of any kind. It takes an effort now, where I could just make things happen before. I’m improving, though.