Deciding whether to save non-optimal images is something all photographers face. Back in the days when photographs were captured on rolls of film, it was a no-brainer to keep the negatives at the very least. Nowadays, it is tempting to delete the images we don’t immediately recognize as good ones. After all, high quality digital images take up a lot of space on hard drives. Here’s yet another reason to reconsider hitting the delete button. Yesterday I shared an image from a PTA meeting about 40 years ago. In the “best image” many faces are obscured. When I consider the sequence of images, however, I can identify many more people. You can see what I mean.

My mother and I are working slowly but surely toward getting her 40 plus years of negatives organized, and a selection of them scanned. We got a big batch of scanned images back recently, and I finally had time to take a close look. Here’s a fun one. This was taken shortly after we moved to Mississippi, probably in 1973. My classmates and I are in the Richardson Primary School cafeteria, performing at a PTA meeting.

I happen also to be in the midst of helping plan a party celebrating the 30th anniversary of our graduation from Port Gibson High School. I have a feeling we’ll get some laughs from these old photographs. I see our class president Morise Duffin and Stephani Barnes, Tabatha Martin, Sheila Dorsey, Tamara Henderson, Joe Wilson, Patrick Mackey, Sonya Chapman. Other angles in other shots give me Pearl Smith and Dejuan Griffin. Help me with some of the other identifications, classmates.