Like many of you reading this, I’ve spent the vast majority of the past three months at home. For the first two months I didn’t go into grocery stores. I didn’t go into home improvement stores. I didn’t go for a drive. I barely took any new photos, and when I did, I didn’t leave my yard. I just did what I could at home with what I had. This included making weird, incomplete meals, like burritos without wraps or spaghetti with only the sauce and meatballs. And working in the yard, of course.

My indoor time was spent reading online articles ranging from the absurdly optimistic (“Clinical trials advancing quickly! We’ll have a vaccine very, very soon!”) to outright depressing (“We’re all going to die and nothing will be the same.”)

But the silver lining in all this is the amount of time I’ve had to go through my unpublished photos and review them. And I cannot express enough how big of a deal this has been (and will be) for me.

Over the past five years or so the pace of my little photography career had increased rapidly. Workshops and private lessons both in Oregon and throughout the West meant that I was spending most of my time helping clients acquire and post-process photos and doing very, very little of my own acquisition and post-processing. I struggled to post-process my own work when I was away from home.

These unpublished photos were an albatross around my neck. I had a hard time staying motivated creatively. And it’s very difficult to return to a place like Arches National Park for another round of night-sky photos when I haven’t even fully found out what I got the previous time.

My photographic process has always been about refining and improvement, either via my vision, my in-field techniques, my post-processing techniques, or, in some cases, my gear. I felt like I had skipped this crucial step over the past few years, and I owed a lot of that to an inability to mine my archives of its full potential.

I’m not finished with my backlog yet. But I already feel much better about it and am on track to finish it.

Here’s a sampling of night-sky photos I’ve finally had the opportunity to work on and publish. It only took the external forces of a global pandemic to make it happen.