Occasionally I tend to wander through my image archives and discover quite a few images actually that I haven’t processed for the website. Just like a bird preening, perhaps there is a grain of sand I haven’t plucked out yet. A friend jokingly said one day – “hey, you post these old pictures and people think you have been to new places?” Well, the picture may be “old” from when the shutter was pressed, but certainly new ‘to the world’ if I have never shown it before. Is it considered somehow uncouth in the photoblogger world to dig into the past?

Western Gull preening, La Jolla, CA Apr 2004

And I have a lot of them! Not necessarily all of them I will show – they can find those when I am dead. Think about it, my online nature photography gallery has 1296 images in it – this one makes 1297. The image catalog number is 8327 – so there are 7,000 images I have cataloged that aren’t shown yet, plus a lot more that are listed as uncataloged. I don’t think I will ever have the time to show them all if I wanted to. It makes you think about the volume of photography out there, not only in our own lives, but multiply that by the billions of people on this planet.

Digital photography certainly has contributed to the volume of images shared, not only taken. Photoblogs, photo sharing sites, online albums and galleries – how could someone possibly see them all? And if you see an image that may be 2 years old or 50 years old – is it any less new to your eyes? And perhaps with so much photography out there, it is easy to become too saturated – and perhaps only the occasional few will actually stick in our heads.