A day out with my camera!

Since giving up on the idea of work I’ve spent a lot of time going through old photos. Not boxes of prints (that’s still to come), but digital photos. They’re spread across multiple ssd hard drives and backed up everywhere I can think.

It’s an intimidating amount of files to sort through, but one thing made it really worthwhile. The software that processes and edits the photos is so much better today than it was 20+ years ago. It’s the same software (Adobe Lightroom), but I can open old photos today and make them look half decent. Photos that were rejected then are now enthusiastically edited to see if there’s potential there.

Lightroom keeps my photos in collections. I have a collection called The River Thames and it has photos in from several dates between 2003 – 2005. While going through the old photos I’ve discovered that the collections don’t tell the story. That “River Thames” collection has a story hidden in it, and I’ve only just found it now. On July the 20th 2003 my friend Lee, who I worked with at Tesco, met up and drove and parked at the Isle of Dogs in London’s East End. We saw some rowers, photographed the Naval College from the civilized side of the river (not easy to say on the Isle of Dogs), walked through the Greenwich tunnel and past the Cutty Sark. There was some WW1 redo or something. It was a nice overcast day for photographing the Naval College.  We got back to the cars hours later and then stopped at Canary Wharf, although looking at the photos today on May 8th 2026, I can see that I was tired on the way home to see if anything had changed since the previous month when we were last there.

I remember sharing a 2 or 3 of photos on my then UK website. I think one appeared in a Thames album and a couple in the Greenwich album. None of the others have really been touched since that Sunday.

The story of July the 20th 2003 more, and I hope to write a number of blog posts about days in the past when I really enjoyed my camera. The photos weren’t great. The Canon 10D with 2 cheap lenses really was awful and both had a short history in my camera bag. Today’s Lightroom allows me to get the most out of the 2003 digital camera sensor and I’m enjoying working the old photos. So much nicer than shitty, shoebox condos.