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.