Motley Flies
I recently went through my large archive of images. Suddenly I had a whole bunch of fly images. I gathered them into a small gallery.
I have more images than I want to think of. My current main archive contains 247,473 images, and the only reason it isn't closer to a quarter million is that I haven't copied over my recent photos from my "day-to-day" archive (a mere 60,000+ photos), and updated the Lightroom catalog.
As you can imagine a large portion of these images are fishing and tying related, and when I go though the lot as I do now and then, I bump into lots of nice images that I want to share. Recently I did a search for the word "flies" and found myself culling out nice images of flies. I wound up with a mixed bag of fly images - boxes, detail, whole flies, handfuls - and decided to put together a very heterogeneous gallery with what I found. So forgive the mixed content. Consider it an inspiration and a way for me to share some of my thousands of photos.
There are no pattern descriptions or materials lists. Some of the flies don't even have names, and are just one offs or experiments. I will link to patterns and articles where it's relevant.
My fly tying images fall in some categories: flies head on, typically shot in a vise, step-by-step images, images of many flies in boxes, hands on tables etc. and images "in the wild" - typically by the water. The above images are obviously of boxes. My own humble box filled for a trip to Ireland, and my good friends Niels Have and Ken Bonde''s impressing salmon fly boxes - classic flies as well as modern flies respectively.
These two tyers are both very well represented in my image stash because I have done many photo sessions with both during the years. Ken and I did many step-by-step series and Niels often stops by with his impressing flies and allows me to shoot them.
Ken - who sadly isn't with us anymore - was a true tying machine, and the image below shows his window sill with a production of the Danish sea trout Grey Frede. And yes, that pile in the front is flies, not scraps!
The flies above are the Dirty White, an unnamed epoxy shrimp, the Trés Bien and Jiggys.
Niels is still tying, and more productive than ever. His flies are typically classic and modern salmon salmon flies, but he has also tied saltwater flies and of course flies for our Danish sea run brown trout.
You can see more of Niels' flies here.. This article is solely about Jock Scott
Of course I have a gazillion images of my own flies, which are after all the ones I have closest by.
The Grey Fred is found here, and Branchu is here.
A final little story about preserving images: A few weeks ago I posted this on Facebook:
I have about a quarter of a million digital images in my archive, meticulously organized and indexed, easy to navigate. It's easy to locate a certain image. I found all the other images from the article, but not this particular one in spite of going through all backups (I have several) and image collections.
Very annoying!
Whenever that happens, I always think "which other images have I lost?"
I enlarged the best copy I had, and did with that, but still...
Well, I found the image during this Lightroom stint, so it isn't gone. I (of course) had the whole series. It was just badly tagged (shame on you, Martin!). Below is the image, freshly produced from the original.
Read about the Mickey Finn here.
PS: I just backed up all images and updated the catalog, and the archive now contains 261,819 images.
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