Just a Skeleton

The other day I got all psyched up to enter the annual Nat Geo photo contest. In case you’ve never done that, it takes a lot of small print reading, a lot of picking through files, and a lot of nerve. If you ever do it yourself, here’s a tip: Do NOT go out and look at what everyone else has submitted until after you have chosen your own.

So I was happily, courageously picking through photos when I tripped over the reason I quit processing this set of Nepal photos over a year ago. Corrupted files. Not just one or two, but fifteen out of a string of 25 were damaged. That means I missed most of a thought. Most of an experience. The ones on either side are the preamble and the denouement. The guts are missing, the actual reason I had my camera clicking.

Below is one of the images that was damaged and visible only in JPEG version (most cameras write a viewable JPEG with the RAW file so  you can see it on your LCD screen after it’s taken. But this was just the JPEG. The RAW file is unreadable. In essence, it’s only a skeleton of the original photo. I can’t open it in any program (save this little viewer) and I can’t edit or affect it. So I snapped a screen shot of it and cleaned it up in Photoshop as well as I could.