Week 12: Finally Trying to Get Organized
YES! Let's get on with organizing, editing, and posting.
PHOTO JOURNAL 2026
James Bradley
3/26/20263 min read
YES! Let's get on with organizing, editing, and posting.
Week 12: Finally Trying to Get Organized
By Week 12, the photo challenge had officially started teaching me lessons I did not ask for. I wanted to learn photography, camera settings, editing, composition, and all of that fun stuff. What I did not realize was that I was also going to have to learn file organization, posting schedules, and folder systems.
I think I am finally starting to admit that my “just take pictures and figure it out later” system is not exactly bulletproof. Actually, calling it a system might be generous. It was more like a digital junk drawer full of photos, edits, maybes, rejects, and “I swear I already posted this” moments.
This is about where I started trying to organize the challenge better by setting up folders for each week and filling them with the photos I planned to post for the following week. It sounds simple, and it probably should have been simple from the beginning, but apparently I needed to make a mess first before I believed in folders. Sometimes I have to learn things the hard way. Shocking, I know.
This week had a good mix again. There was a white horse, an eagle on a post, a sunset over the water, clouds, a pattern shot, a zebra, and a sunrise over the same water. Looking back at these photos, I can see that I was still bouncing between subjects, but I was also starting to get more intentional about what caught my eye.
My favorite photo this week is probably the eagle on the post. I like the close framing, the blue sky, and the way the eagle stands out. It feels like one of the stronger wildlife photos from this part of the challenge. I still had plenty to learn, but this one felt like a little win.
The white horse photo is another one I like. It has a softer, quieter feel to it, and I like the mood of the cloudy sky behind it. I probably could have done better with the edit, but there is something about the expression and the framing that works for me.
My least favorite this week is the zebra colt. It was a spur of the moment shot. In and of itself that is not a bad thing to do, and often it works out well for me. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while right? However, this one is not a photo that jumps out and grabs you by the head and screams "HEY...LOOK AT ME WILL YA"! You get my point. So I learn from it and move on.
The clouds photo and the pattern shot are interesting to me because they show I was still experimenting. Not every photo had to be wildlife, landscapes, or obvious subjects. Sometimes I was just testing shape, color, texture, or whatever grabbed my attention for a second. Some of those experiments worked better than others, but they all helped me learn.
So, Week 12 is done. I am still taking pictures, still making mistakes, and still trying to turn this whole thing into something organized enough to keep moving forward. The good news is that the folder system started to help. The bad news is that I probably should have done it sooner. But hey, if I had everything figured out already, this would be a pretty short blog.
I would love to get some feedback from you all about the photography learning process. Please feel free to shoot me an email through my contact page.
Thanks for reading!
