I’ve spent the last few weeks rebuilding the site under a new WordPress theme. Normally, switching themes is a pretty simple process, but this new theme uses a completely different image gallery gizmo than the old one, which means I had to rebuild all the galleries one-by-one.

Even though this was a time-intensive process, I quite liked the opportunity to look back through all the photos from these past seven years. As I worked my way through them, I started to wonder just how many underwater sessions I’ve done. How many models have I worked with? How many times have I clicked the shutter while squinting through the blurry port of my underwater camera case?

It took a big of digging, but I eventually learned that from 2008 through 2014:

• I did a total of 67 underwater sessions
• I worked with 68 different models
• All this generated a total of 39,596 image files

Just in case I look back on this in a few years and can’t figure out how I came up with these numbers, I’ll provide some additional details:

• I defined a session to be the event where I worked with a single model or a defined group. Huh? Let’s say one day I worked with just one model. That was obviously one session. Usually, however, there are more than one model and they switch out throughout the day. So now let’s say there were three models and I shot each of them separately. That would be three sessions. But now let’s get tricky and say that the next day another three models showed up, but this time two of them worked together in pretty much every shot. That day would then have two sessions.
• To determine the total number of models, I did my best to only count each model once, even if I’ve worked with her many times. That means a single model might account for multiple sessions.
• I went the very lazy route for counting the number of image files. All I did was to to the top level folder that holds all my underwater work, right clicked and selected Properties. This number of 39,596 is a little high, however, because if I took any image into Photoshop, that would generate a second file. But I really don’t think that would add more than a couple percent to the overall count.

So if I did 67 sessions, why aren’t there 67 galleries on this site? There are a few reasons why photos from a particular image didn’t make it online:

• My first few sessions in 2008 where highly experimental. Those earliest models were kind enough and patient enough to help me get through that initial learning curve. We did end up with a few good shots here and there, but overall they were a bit too rough.
• Some sessions were never intended for online use. There have been several instances where models wanted underwater images for their own use, perhaps for their own portfolio or for some other promotional material.
• I always have the model look at a preview of the gallery before I push it live, just to make sure they’re OK with everything. There have been a couple times where I simply never heard back from the model after sending the gallery, leaving those images in a state of limbo.

And that’s pretty much it for the underwater stuff. I still have a few non-underwater galleries to clean up before I can call this new-theme-launch finished, but the biggest part is now behind me… just in time to start thinking about the 2015 season!