David Askham's 'Lucky Dip' - (2025)

Many people will have childhood memories of dipping into Santa's sack, and selecting a wrapped gift. Such memories are rekindled when I start my annual review of older images on my computer, usually in early January when there are fewer opportunities for practical photography




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Revisiting images taken a few years ago is very like those childhood experiences of a lucky dip. You never know quite what you're going to find, like the "Bull's Eye" above. Remember, in the early years of digital photography most people kept everything. Only with experience were duff images, or similars, deliberately deleted. Winter is the perfect time to engage in this highly beneficial activity. Rubbish is cleared; forgotten images are rediscovered, and gems identified. So where do you start?





Filtering your collection

Some image processing software, such as Adobe Elements or Lightroom or ACDSee, contains a means of filtering images by useful parameters. For example, by dates taken, camera, lens etc. For my current exercise, I was interested in pictures taken on my first serious Leica digital camera, namely my Leica Digilux 2 which I still possess. There were thousands of images, mostly unflagged, because they predated my use of appropriate filtering methods. So I set another filter to show those that had never been properly edited. That reduced the number appreciably. The remainder had been flagged and rated and it was very tempting to get sidetracked. But I stuck to my initial plan. Keyboard shortcut ‘X’ would mark images destined to be deleted; whereas ‘P’ was a marker for ‘Picked’ as a keeper. At the end of a session I reviewed all images marked for deletion, just in case any ‘keeper’ had accidently slipped through the net. The rest of the rejects were then deleted and the pool of unflagged images was reduced. Progress!





Be aware of fatigue and other distractions. I aim to limit such periods of review to about 40 minutes, certainly no longer than one hour. Also I choose my desktop monitor in preference to using a small mobile device. You are less likely to make mistakes. When all images in your filtered selection have been flagged or rejected, you can move on to rating them to reflect their potential value. I will address this phase in a separate article, IF members would welcome it. Please comment accordingly





Rediscoveries
I bought my Leica Digilux 2 in 2004, two decades ago. Hence it it is no surprise that I should have forgotten about many of those early pictures. Every review session revealed a special moment in our lives and how our lives and garden had evolved. As is typical on such occasions, I wonder why so many interesting pictures have lain unseen and unused for so long.

There is a lesson to be learned from this New Year exercise. Don't restrict it to early January. Make it a part of your weekly or regular routine. In that way, once you are up-to-date, and all of your images are rated, it will simply become a small maintenance job. You will always know what treasures you have and how to find them.





The Leica Digilux 2 only has a 5 mp sensor, puny compared with the latest Leica cameras. Yet I have been astonished by the quality of many of my oldest digital images from that camera. In one example, I spontaneously photographed our house cat drinking fresh water from a running tap. The picture above is the result from cropping the original photograph to the equivalent of about half, that is just 2.5 mp. The picture may not win prizes, but the quality is remarkably good and it is highly suitable for social media linking family and friends. (Please do comment and tell me what you think) Why not play Lucky Dip with your own digital files and see what treasures you find?