Looking back through my files......

It's something that I do from time to time. The storage of images and files on hard drives can sometimes trick us into  believing that we have already shown the world what is worthy of sharing.  There are tens of thousands of images from my work and travels that sit as bits and bytes in a digital form on hard drives that precariously spin around whenever the computer is started up, forgotten and lost among all the other stuff' . There must have been a reason at the time of taking the image for, taking the image. But, we now shoot in a way that minimises the image's status.  As a digital file, we tend to overshoot and never end up examining the fruit of the shutter.   The image above is an example.  Taken in Tenerife on a cloudy day whilst wandering around a small town near the coast.. Having stumbled over the picture on a review of storage space on one of my drives,I found the image and remembered what I had seen in my minds eye at the time.   There is a little dodging and burning of the image to bring detail back in the shadows and highlights - nothing more that would have been done in the days of analogue black and white photography in darkroom, the practice of holding back exposure onto the paper and burning' in parts of the projected image  before placing the image in the developer bath.. then the magic as the latent image appears whilst still in the chemicals of the developer' tray.  The process that I learnt in the seventies.. of last century as a young man having stumbled over the hobby photography. I can vividly remember the first image that I put through this process to this day..  a magic experience.... From that negative a little magic happened. The slow methodical art in the dark room was to me a consuming experience. One that perhaps today the instant gratification of the image appearing on the back of the Camera,or Phone has replaced.. most people of younger years wouldn't know what a film canister was, and the method and skill in  bringing the print into being.  Even practiced photographers of the digital age, rarely print' an image to display on their wall. It remains on a hard drive somewhere waiting to be born..    The shoe box in the loft full of old prints and memories has preserved time and allowed the pictures to breath again..  Not so for the digital file, that is a risk from birth of being deleted either accidentally or just to make space for the next snap. !!!!