#2519S

I am in the middle of an epic multitasking session. I am at my second job at a sports channel, with a live broadcast going, while my laptop screen is split between a text editor and the new season of “Andor” playing.

On the way to work I listened to a recording of the new pope, Leo XIV making his first speech the other day, after his election. I am mourning the end of a momentus event that I didn’t get to be a part of.

The morning Pope Francis died, as I was drinking my morning cofee and reading the news, I remember feeling very clearly that I was supposed to be in Rome. I felt called or something like that. A calm, obvious feeling: this is important, this is happening at a particular time in a particular place and I’m supposed to be a part of that.

Then of course I didn’t go. I am not in a place financially to do something like this and I was just about to start in a new job so this wasn’t the time for me to up and go to camp out in St. Peter’s square for weeks, documenting the mourning, the period of the conclave, the people gathered from all over the world, in a community of faith and expectation and overwhelming emotion. The moment Leo XIV stepped out onto the loggia to give his first Urbi et Orbi blessing, I knew this chance was gone for good. A moment has ended, a chapter has closed, and time began to move forward. Sede vacante, an “empty chair”, felt somehow personal to me.

I’m thinking about how I work with my photo library. Currently I have a master Lightroom catalog with every image from 2019 to today in it, with the raw files spread across three external drives. A fourth drive holds exported jpegs, in a folder structure mirroring that of the raws.
This system feels fragile. A monolithic catalog, no way to put away drives with old images I don’t use. The reason is that my portfolio and project selects are only reliably collected as collections in this catalog.

So now I’m trying to come up with a new structure, with spearate catalogs by year, and a new library of “positives” - exported files, organized in some way so that can become my primary collection of work.
Meanwhile, Lightroom catalogs will serve for selecting and processing files, but ones things are exported, the catalogs of raws will not be touched again unless I need to make new exports.

I’m finding this difficult, my mind is not clear, and this seems at the same time very simple and very complex. I’ll need to keep thinking.

Well, anyways.