I had worked with Bone­yard Cloth­ing in early 2012, and loved every­thing they did. When another oppor­tu­nity came up in May 2012, I was thrilled for a stu­dio shoot.

It was lots of fun with a vari­ety of looks among three mod­els, and I was excited to get BYC the work. I slipped the mem­ory card in my bag and went home to process the pho­tos. And at home, I opened the bag and looked for the card. And looked, and looked, and looked. And pan­icked. I had never phys­i­cally lost a card before (and haven’t since), and wasn’t really sure what to do. I did the only thing I could do — call BYC, apol­o­gize, and accept that I had let them down.

Until this past week.

As I was dig­ging around in a long-repurposed bag for some­thing else, I felt what could be a mem­ory card. Lo and behold, there was a lit­tle sleeve inside a zip­pered pocket. When exam­ined, it was the lost card! I was greatly relieved to get the ses­sion back (although two years late) and was sur­prised at how much my style has changed, at least in what I was tak­ing for the major­ity of the shots. Although my per­sonal favorite picks from that ses­sion are still (roughly) in line with what I would shoot today, I liked see­ing a lit­tle bit of pro­gres­sion here and there.

My sen­ti­men­tal­ity gauge is pretty unbal­anced with this work, as I believed for years that it was com­pletely gone. The redis­cov­ery of these images has been a great boon, not least of which for the free­dom that I see in the work. There are many ele­ments in much of the rest of the series that I would be sure to clean up now in the stu­dio rather than in post, and even in the above I see a few bits that I would try and adjust in the moment. But isn’t that a lit­tle bit of what makes nos­tal­gia nos­tal­gic? That we can’t go back and relive the past, but we can at least learn and laugh a lit­tle at the experience?

Thanks to Bone­yard Cloth­ing for set­ting up the shoot, and Justin of The Go Dev­ils for being the model in the above photograph.