Lesson #10: Always review your archives before deleting them

They call me snapper. I'm not happy unless I've taken ten photos of the one thing. My workflow consists of this:

Snap heaps of photos experimenting with settings...
Load all onto the computer filed according to year - month - activity...
Go through, pick out favourites, sharing, WOW factor and images to edit...
Edit images and save into respective folders - facebook, flickr, blog, photography...
Start all over again...

Leaving hundreds, thousands of photos left in my archives! What to do with them? Get a bigger hardrive? Delete? I'll be honest, a small part inside of me dies when I delete photos, even if they are complete and utter rubbish! (This is coming from someone who as a child would waste a whole film on taking photos of her bedroom...and keep the photos...) but there is no point keeping photos that are blurry, exactly the same, over-exposed, too dark, or will never be looked at again.

HOWEVER, before you go and delete all those folders GO BACK AND LOOK AGAIN. Check and double check. This is not me being obsessive compulsive this is coming from experience. I nearly wiped my card once without checking. Had I done so I would have missed out on this baby.

While travelling my faithful HP computer decided to crash, hence I needed to transfer my photos first onto an external hardrive, then onto a new computer...which consequently crashed requiring a second transfer onto a third computer. In the process I somehow lost 150 photos. Gone. Have no idea what I am missing, except I know there was a lighthouse there, as well as some great caves. All I now have of these photos is this blog post. And yes, part of me is dead.

So always check and double check when deleting photos, moving photos. Not to mention, it's fun! When I went back through my archives recently, I found these little images taken on my Olympus. My Olympus u-900 is a great compact digital camera, if a little beaten up now. I still use him regularly on the water in his case, and he doesn't take too bad photos really! These were taken in my student days when we were first married and I was just starting to really get into taking more than snaps.

In the back yard - I remember liking this photo because the nodes were in focus..and nothing else!! 

Purple. Need I say more?