Challenging Challenge

Challenges are fun …

… Except when they become a bit frustrating. That was the case with a Lens-Artists challenge posed by Patti Moen with the topic “The Power of Juxtapostion“. As I had just juxtaposed two photos in Monday Window, I thought it would be neat to gather some photos that show contrasting things, like old and new, big and small, young and old, bright and dark, empty and full. I have many such photos, but I never used the tag “juxtaposition”. How would I find good examples? Looking through my archive from start to finish would take the better part of a day, maybe longer.

I racked my brain for some memorable photos that would fit. There were several that came to mind. I recalled a photo of a new sprout in a stump. I had photographed some glasses of different sizes, even set a positive and negative image side by side. Those would fit the topic.

I recalled a bird next to a fisherman on a beach. That one would be good. I decided to look for it. Which of my tags would apply? We live five hours from the nearest seashore; we don’t get there very often, searching on “Tybee Island” might do the trick. Nope, it didn’t show up.

There were some other good photos that would work and I copied some into my challenges folder. But now I was determined to find that photo of bird and man. Maybe the bird was an egret or a heron. It did show up for either of those tags. My tagging never has been very thorough. Let me look under Savannah. Nothing, nada, nil.

By now I had spent a couple of hours and hadn’t found that photo. There is no “fisherman” tag in my archive. Maybe I should just search on “bird”.

There are tons of bird photos in my collection and that search brought up over three thousand images. I decided to scroll through them.

Finally, there it was! It was not from at a Georgia seashore; it was taken in Florida. Aaarrrgh!

It had taken much longer than it should have. Well, I put a post together, “Juxtaposition“.

I posted those finds a couple of days ago, but today I had to vent.

Here are some others I came across that I had mostly used in posts here.

Moral of this story? Tag your photos thoroughly, completely, with everything that applies!

.:. © 2026 Ludwig Keck