In January, I (finally) embraced Lightroom. Now that I’ve been working with it for a few months I can’t believe I resisted it for so long. Unsurprisingly, in utilizing a powerful new (to me) tool I found myself rethinking my image workflow. I’m struck by aspects of the old workflow which were rooted in how I handled negatives.
One compelling feature of Lightroom is that it builds a database of the images and metadata you import and create within the program. I am slowly building a database that starts with old family images that predate my birth (which I scanned) and goes up to the images I shot today.
I began exploring digital photography by dipping my toes in the water- I bought a negative/slide scanner and learned how to process images in Viewscan and Photoshop. I would shoot film, bring the canister to the lab and take home a strip of processed negatives which I would painstakingly scan and develop digitally.
I devised a naming convention focused on utilizing the roll number and the frame number. At the time, it seemed very important for me to be able to relate the digital files to the physical negative or slide.
Ten years later, I can’t see why I thought it was so important to make so direct a connection to the “original” physical object. My slides and negatives have always been stored and labeled properly 
making it fairly easy to find the right frame. I can only assume that despite all the effort I put into digitizing I only saw it as a derivative of the film.
Makes me wonder, does anyone in book production have parallel experiences?