Posted Friday, May 16th, 2025 at 04:50 UTC

For something around the past year, nearly all of my photography and related pursuits have had an audience of one. Aside from quick phone shots to share via stories with primarily friends and family, I simply haven’t had the interest or energy to maintain a real presence on the closed social media platforms. The motivation to do so is really undercut when even close friends and family members who have followed me for years would rarely, if ever, see the photos when I was still posting, because the owners of those platforms would rather fill everyone’s feeds with clickbait and ads.

And so, quick stories when I would land in a new (to me) city or hike up an interesting path or catch a nice sunset were the only public signs of life. For the most part, however, my shutter clicking didn’t slow down. That’s left me in the position of having a couple years’ worth of photos and videos from dozens of countries across four continents that have never seen the light of day outside my devices. Which flies right in the face of why I most love to lug a camera around with me: to share at least a little bit of what I see and experience on this giant rock hurtling through the universe, to maybe, possibly, hopefully encourage someone else to get out and experience just a little bit more during this one precious life we each get.

My typical workflow isn’t terribly complex. I start each day out with empty cards in the cameras. In dual slot cameras I always prefer to write duplicates to both rather than use them in series. I’d rather carry a few extra cards and have the redundancy than save the thirty seconds it takes to swap cards, and with card sizes these days I rarely fill them up anyway unless I’m doing video. When I’m done for the day, these cards get emptied out to a set of working folders on paired SSDs, because you can never be too paranoid with duplicates and backups of shots you may never be able to capture again.

These are very roughly organized into a folder structure based on whatever combination of project/trip, date, location, and source I feel is enough to keep my head wrapped around what I’m collecting. I also find it easier to deal with having all the camera shots separate from drone shots separate from action cams separate from field recorders separate from … you get the idea. The SSDs keep receiving each day’s output until they’re full and the next pair of SSDs get handed the relay batons.

This repeats until the trip or project is over, at which point I’m comfortably nestled back in front of my work desk with coffee in hand and a NAS by my side. All the SSDs have their contents moved over to a triage area on the NAS where I can begin the mass grouping and culling. During longer trips, I may have already done light sorting and deleting of obviously-bad shots, but I usually wait until I’m done with that particular photo gathering adventure and have a better sense of what’s going to sit within the margins of usability and may be worth holding on to a bit longer, just in case.

And that’s where I find myself now. I managed to moved some of the really big stuff out to their long-term archival folders, because I generally don’t take a lot of long aerial drone or vehicle-mounted action cam footage and those end up being easier to sort, prune, and archive. But nearly 80,000 photos sit there right now, looming like some impenetrable stone wall between the past few years of travel and my desire to share where I’ve been and some of the things I’ve seen. There’s a method to their current organization, but it is in no way sufficient for the volume of material to sort through in a timely manner.

So forgive me as I slowly sprinkle little bits onto this site. Things will be sparse as I begin to chip away at the massive rock of this backlog.