Four years into this business and I still haven’t figured out the ‘best’ method for what to save & what to delete.  I started out saving every RAW file, but then over time I started deleting things in order to save space on my back-up hard drive.  Last week I went through and deleted thousands of RAW files because I knew that the clients wouldn’t need them & therefore, neither would I.  I still saved all the edited images, of course.  These were just the original, unedited images that I was deleting.

Then, this week I lost a dear friend.  I’m still in shock, along with pretty much all his friends and family.  I find myself lingering on his Facebook page constantly, looking at pictures, videos, recent posts… anything to remember him by.  As friends started sharing their favorite photos of him, one friend shared a photo I recognized.  I had taken the photo, and it was months before I really had really gotten to know him.  He’s in the yellow hoodie.

I went back through my hard drives hoping I hadn’t deleted all the images.  Thankfully, I hadn’t, and found several images of him from that event.  It was Christmas 2012 and for some reason, I never edited all the images.  I guess I had just culled through the best ones and they only needed a few so I didn’t bother editing the rest.

I can’t even tell you how glad I am that I still had those.  So very thankful.

I should also probably prepare those on my Facebook page for the onslaught of pictures they’ll be getting from here on out.

You see, my Facebook page has mainly been cute pictures of my kid for the past 2.5 years.  And when I went back to find pictures of John, I couldn’t find a single picture of the two of us together.  What?!  Seriously?It’s sad, but true.  I’ve been avoiding pictures & have been making little jokes about it for years.  But now I realize just how nice it would be to have a picture with a friend who is no longer here.  And I’m so SO thankful that he wasn’t too shy to take a selfie every now and then.