At last I have found it after a month-long search! My filing systems leave much to be desired and my organizational skills have been a lifelong challenge but I have always managed despite the chaos. When my desk at work was piled high with miscellaneous, unrelated papers, I was still able to quickly sift through the piles and extract the exact piece of paper needed. That chaos remains but now it is digital chaos and it is not writing projects but photographic projects. I usually can quickly find any photograph I’m seeking but, while I attempt to organize my photographs in a way that allows me to locate them, sometimes I screw up.
While in Magee Marsh a month ago, I took a few photographs of a Blackburnian Warbler that were the only good shots of that bird that I got while we were there. It is a striking bird and I recalled one photograph that stood out from the rest. The problem was, I couldn’t find it. Each evening after a day of shooting, I downloaded the photographs to one hard drive and made a backup on another. Then I categorized the photographs by species if they were animals. I used other identifiers for other types of photographs.
When I got home I recalled the photographs of the warbler and I wanted to make a blog post of it but I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t with the other Blackburnian warbler files so I reviewed every file for every day of shooting (or so I thought) and it wasn’t there. I decided that I must have been mistaken about taking that photograph so I stopped looking for it. Since my visit to Magee Marsh, I have been to Costa Rica and Canada and will soon be heading off to Arizona. In preparation, I decided to clean up my MacBook Air. In so doing, I discovered a folder from Magee Marsh that, contrary to my normal routine, I downloaded to the computer’s hard drive but not to either of my primary drives. In those files was the Blackburnian Warbler photo I was seeking. Eureka! The bird perched for only a few seconds and I shot it through just a small opening in the leaves but I think the shot shows off the beauty of that tiny bird despite the branch its perched on blocking part of its body, the rather high key effect of the background, and, once again, the subject appearing smack dab in the center of the photograph.
