21 Sep 2020 HOORAY FOR THE SYSTEM

Thank god one of my first decisions when I began videoing, was to colour code my film diary according to subject matter. This allowed me to swiftly keep track of the footage over the years. A few months ago, I submitted an image to illustrate an article about aggregating golden orb spiders, for one of the mountain papers, to which I contribute fortnightly. The image was a wide shot, showing 50 or more spiders against a blue sky. Unfortunately, it could not be printed because the spiders were too small to register and I had not selected any medium shots of the footage. Tracking it down was made easier because I knew I had filmed aggregations in 2007 and 2008. Since then I have not seen any, either here or elsewhere. The omission prompted me to revisit the footage and capture additional shots for future reference.

A week ago, a web article about Australian stinging trees caused me to check my site to confirm that it included two of the three species mentioned in the article. It only included the giant stinging tree. I was certain I had filmed the shiny leaf stinging tree one night, but I couldn’t remember when, although I knew where. Checking the night filming entries in the film diary, I was able to cross-reference the date of filming and the number of the tape containing the footage. I selected three shots yesterday, which I hope to capture with Steve tomorrow night. I greatly value the opportunity to fill any gaps in content by revisiting old footage and hope that this need will arise regularly.