585 Is the Magic Number

If you follow my photography, you’ve probably noticed it’s been a little quiet lately.

I’m one of those folks who posts something every day. And every day, someone out there probably thinks, that dude is seriously always somewhere beautiful.

For the past few weeks, I haven’t been posting anything. So those same people are probably now thinking, well, he’s probably not somewhere beautiful. Maybe he’s in a… a… a city. Eeek.

But they would be wrong.

There are reasons my photo feed has gone dark. I’ve been building a new website. I’ve been writing fiction. I’ve been working long hours. I’ve been traveling. But pish-posh — those are just excuses, and we both know it.

Where you’d really be wrong is in thinking I don’t have anything to post.

Oh, I have something to post.

I have *585 * somethings to post.

The Magic Number

585 is the number of RAW frames that came off my camera on my last expedition.

585.

I have enough material to post daily for months. Buttes and birds and buildings and buffalo. (Yes. Buffalo. Really.) Landscapes. Portrait-orientation studies of rocks. Slot canyons in both portrait and landscape, because I am nothing if not thorough. And skies. So many skies. You have never seen this many skies. I have skies for days. I have skies for quarters.

And there they sit.

Because 585 is the exact number at which my brain folds its little arms, sits down in the dirt, and refuses to move.

A Brief Tour of the Math

Let me walk you through the paralysis, because I think the math is genuinely important to understanding my suffering.

If I edit one photo, I have edited one photo. I have 584 left. This is depressing. The pile barely noticed.

If I edit ten photos — a heroic session, a session I would absolutely tell people about — I have 575 left. The pile is laughing at me.

If I sat down and edited fifty photos in a single day, which I have never once done in my life and which would require a kind of monkish discipline I do not possess, I would still have 535 left. And I would be dead. My eyes would be gone. I would have developed opinions about white balance that no human should have to hold.

So instead, I have edited zero.

Zero is, mathematically, the only number that doesn’t make the situation worse. You can’t fail at editing if you never open Lightroom. This is airtight logic and I will not be taking questions.

My Very Well-Defined Workflow

Here’s the part that really gets me.

I have a workflow. A good one. A workflow I have described to other people, out loud, with the confidence of a man who has his act together. Cull, then rate, then pick selects, then edit the selects, then export. It’s a great workflow. It works beautifully on, say, forty photos.

585 photos look at my workflow the way a hurricane looks at a beach umbrella.

The first step is supposed to be the cull — the quick pass where you reject the obvious throwaways. Easy, right? Except at 585 frames, even the culling is a project. To cull, I have to look at all 585. To look at all 585, I have to open the catalog. To open the catalog, I have to be a person who is ready to confront what he has done. And most evenings, I am simply not that person. Most evenings I am a person who would rather reorganize a closet.

I have reorganized several closets.

Things I Have Done Instead of Editing These Photos

• Built a website.
• Written multiple chapters of a novel.
• Written songs.
• Written this, an entire article, about not editing the photos, which — and I want to be honest with myself here — took less effort than editing even one of the photos would have.
• Stared at the Lightroom icon.
• Closed Lightroom.
• Told myself I would do it “this weekend.” (Which weekend? Unclear. A weekend. The platonic weekend. The weekend that exists in theory.)

The Buffalo Deserve Better

Here is the genuinely sad part, and the reason I’m writing this instead of just quietly suffering.

Some of those 585 frames are good. I know they are. I remember taking them. I remember the morning the light came over the butte and I actually said “oh” out loud, alone, to no one. I remember the buffalo. (Still really.) I remember standing in a slot canyon turning the camera sideways and thinking this one, this is the one.

Those photos exist. Right now. Finished, in every way except the one that lets you see them. They are trapped behind a number.

And every day I don’t open the catalog, the number doesn’t get smaller. It just gets heavier.

So Here’s What’s Going to Happen

I’m publishing this with no photo attached. On purpose. A photography post with no photography — a little monument to the backlog.

But I’m also publishing it as a promise, mostly to myself, with you as the witnesses: I’m going to open the catalog. Not all 585. Not this weekend, not the platonic weekend. Tonight. I’m going to open it and pick ten. Just ten. And those ten are going up.

And then I’ll have 575 left, and the pile will laugh at me, and I’ll do it again the next day.

That’s the only way out of a number like 585. Not a heroic session. Not the perfect weekend. Just ten, and then ten, and then ten.

If you see a photo from me in the next few days — a butte, a bird, a building, a buffalo — you’ll know it worked. And if you don’t, well.

You’ll know the number won.

Wish me luck. Send coffee. Do not, under any circumstances, ask me how many frames came off the camera on the trip before this one.

From The Work — though notably without any of the work.

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