Archive – Ginger Surprise

I was up till about 4.30am this morning sorting out my Image Archive into a 1TB Hard Drive… you know how it is when you get started with something and you cant stop till you’re finished. I got into a rhythm and get real satisfaction from having all my shit is one sock!

I now have the enviable task of renaming, cataloging, matadata and keywording and then Backing up of 250,000 images that include RAW and JPG files, PSD’s and a few movies…. It makes me wish I’d been on the ball with my archive from the start. Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

It was a refreshing look at some old images though, and having a cursory look through the folders on 4 different external hard drives made me realise just how many images I have festering in their naughts and zeros form with little hope of ever seeing the light of day let alone getting them published anywhere.

So I have decided to release some of them, and on quiet days I promise to have a search through and show some of them on my blog. Here is the first and I think it’s a funny one from My archive back in 2004 when I was a serving member of the Royal Navy Photography Branch with the Royal Marines in Iraq.

I was on Patrol with the lads from 40 Commando in Basra City and we were driving in a small convoy of snatch Landrovers when a message came over the radio to stop so that one of the fellas could investigate something by the roadside. I took the chance to get out and take some pictures of the Marines on foot in the streets and was confronted by the subjects of the patrols fascination. To our amazement amongst the locals were these two Albino Ginger Iraqi kids.

After a ten minute photo-shoot and and a lot hand shaking with the local kids we were on our way again… On the same patrol I saw this young Iraqi child dangerously dodging through the Marine Patrol with a toy AK47 assault rifle.

I think it’s always worth having a dig around in your archive every now and again. Perhaps there are some old images that may enhance or refresh your portfolio. Even though they may not be the most recent of images you may find some gem shots from a portrait shoot you didn’t even realise you’d taken at the time… I intend to write quite a few posts around images from my archive as I complete the mammoth task of sorting them all out. As always comments are very welcome.

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