"Pixel Pot" Film Stew

Film Stew is my own metaphor for the activities incurred during my first week of internship, allow me to lift the lid. My first activity was to move film sides from slide box's into clear plastic holders, sorting out various shoots into years for the purposes of copyright. One way to submit a copyright deposit is to group by year. So here I am dipping into  a heap, a pile, a stack, a slew, lots and loads of slide box's enjoying the "sort" as arm chair traveller. From the mountains of Kazakhstan, to a refinery on the tip of,  St.Croix, from inside a Yurt to the deck of a supertanker. My eyeballs were bloodshot by the end of the second day. As many as you already know I am a man of many questions and the slide material had me asking many. Where to put this? How to pocket the odd ball subjects, soon it became evident if Wayne and Patti were to ever to look for an important image and find it,  the hay stack  jumble I was creating needed to be rethought. I quickly came to see that many subsequent assignments took place over the years in one geographic location.  So what we settle on was to keep the location intact irregardless of the year. The first part of the path then became location -> client,  making the most sense for the purposes of retrieving specific images. Wayne's photographic career as an international photographer seemed to dictate this choice. Later we will copyright but not by year, for now my concentration is on organization. So the flow is; location -> client as one file, subdivided into a variety of  subjects.          So if you wanted a photo of a oil pipeline with a camel in the middle east you might follow the path: Kuwait -> Texaco -> pipeline -> camels. Sorting hundreds of slides into dozens of categories is no easy task. And to think that Wayne has thirty years worth of slides, film and digital files that add up to hundreds of thousands of images, that makes this a formidable project. Wayne stated to me to accomplish the job of cataloging, copyright and stock photography site, he might as well build a barrack and house teams of interns for the next five years. The energy and dedication in this humble office is impressive and inspiring, the job will be accomplished. Wayne's advice to me is to make a regular habit of cataloging and copyright as I go, something he did not do early on.

This is a bit of photographic inspiration pinned to the wall near my work station;

"To take a photograph is to hold ones breath when all the faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy"

Henri Cartier Bresson