Strangeness on a Train, Episode 5
"...and for the first time he noticed that his quarry had left a trail of wet footprints. He bent down to touch one. The water was icy cold."
(click in the image to see a larger version)
Today's image from late 2006 is a good entry for my occasional Time Machine Tuesday posts. It's an illustration from an odd little serial (and, sadly, unfinished) mystery called Strangeness on a Train. It's also an image that ties in to some recent musing on keywords.
I can clearly recall the time when I first got that ol' keyword religion: I was working on a composite image for an illustration in the Strangeness on a Train project. I needed an photo of footprints that I could add to a Lensbaby-blurred shot taken inside an old Pullman sleeping car. I remembered that the previous winter, after a fresh snowfall I had purposefully walked across the street in front of our house just so I could create a nice trail of footprints in the snow that could then be photographed. Because, you never know when you might need an image of footprints, right?
And I had a clear memory of keywording those images. So I did a keyword search for "footprints" in all the photos in my Lightroom image library. And out of a catalog that was, at that time, about 40,000 images, it found those snowy footprints images within a few seconds. I was able to open the image I needed and quickly get back to work on my composite illustration. It was a very heady feeling to have the power to find an image so quickly!
But beyond helping you easily find images, keywords can also add value to your image archive, value that can be measured both in personal and potentially financial terms. You can read more about essential keyword strategy and concepts in my article that was published last week on the BorrowLenses.com blog.
(click in the image to see a larger version)
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