The case of the missing jewelry photos

In January of 2010, I was going to revive my Etsy shop. I had a bunch of inventory that I'd made over the holidays for friends and family and new fresh ideas for more items to add. I really am horrible at taking photos of my work (or most things, but I don't usually fret about quality for family pictures), so I needed to get some help. At a local Etsy "Street Team" workshop, I learned how to set up a light box, got great tips on how to arrange the lighting properly and adjust my digital camera's settings for the best effect.

Doesn't this photo of my origami cicada earrings look great?! I might have taken it, or the pro might have been taking a test shot with my camera. Whichever. After the session, I packed up my new light box, brought all my gear home and planned to put the photos up on my Etsy site soon. Any day now, I'd have some time. Yep. Tick tock.

Time did pass (days? weeks?) and finally, after who knows exactly how long, I found an afternoon to set aside and put my photos up already. They were going to look AWESOME on my page! I was going to start selling stuff and the momentum would come. I grabbed the camera, hooked it up to my laptop and went to download the photos.

The memory card was empty.

A sick sinking feeling, killing my creative energy set in. I asked Monkeyrotica what happened to the photos. He downloaded them, of course! He needed the camera. Where? How the heck should he know? The usual place. I spent hours and hours doing searches in the usual places. I searched by .jpg, by date, by DSC, I browsed, I used Adobe Bridge. NOTHING.

My Etsy shop languished with no new images of work for sale. Every time I thought of taking new photos of my work, that sinking feeling came back, reminding me that I ALREADY HAVE some fabulous photos, somewhere, if only I could find them! I gave up, figuring that they had been deleted.

Then, in mid-2011, we bought an Apple TV. Monkeyrotica had the genius idea of using our shared photo directory as a screen saver, randomly cycling our photos-from-all-time that exist on the hard drive. It's actually mesmerizing, seeing a photo of Dash running on the beach last summer next to Rosie at two months old wrapped up in layers for a stroller ride in the snow. I think a few weeks or more than a month went by when I saw one of the photos from the workshop!!! I think I screamed, "How can I find that!!??" Monkey shrugged. "It's a randomizer. It's in the photo directory somewhere."

At least they hadn't been deleted.

Anyone who's been reading my blog lately knows that I've been digging through the archives, looking for old photos of Rosie and Weegee. It wasn't until last night, when I couldn't find one of her birthday images that I was really excavating. Our photo drive is organized by year, based loosely on the size of the images, and the amounts of photos we were taking at the time. For example, Bundle #1 has years 2002 through 2006 on it, Bundles #2-3 have 2007, #4-6 have 2008, and so forth; we are currently at Bundle #13 for 2011. Where were the jewelry images? OUTSIDE all of the "Bundle" folders in a folder marked "DCIM"! Inside DCIM (WTF does that stand for?), there's a folder labeled "100SANYO" with 274 loose images in it. My photos were at the bottom of the directory.

I'm glad that I have them now, but more than a little upset that they were missing for close to two years. Anyone want to buy some origami earrings for a holiday gift? I take commissions...

And I've totally got to get them up  to sell online. I was thinking about an Artfire.com shop this time. I'll post links when they're up.