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Question about field notes: my pencil sketches beat my own photos when I went back to the Gila cliff dwellings collection
I shot 300 photos at the site in New Mexico, but going through my notebook a week later I could actually match the masonry courses and rebuild the wall layout from the drawings, which the photos never let me do, so does anyone else find their hand drawn stuff more useful than their camera once the dirt's washed off?
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david5621mo ago
Your brain is doing the filtering work when you draw, and the camera isnt. When you sketch a wall you have to decide which stones matter, where the corners are, how many courses stack up. That forces you to actually understand the thing. A photo just grabs everything at once and dumps the problem on future you, who now has to squint at 300 files and guess which blurry slab of rock was the north face. I ran into the same thing mapping rock art panels, my lousy pen drawings showed me the order and spacing of the figures, the photos just showed me a hundred gray smudges. The camera records, the pencil explains.
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