Before I begin I have to say thanks to one of my favorite blogs on the block for pointing this out. Photoshelter’s Shoot! The Blog is my morning coffee reading material. I check it out every day, and sometimes I check back throughout the day. If you don’t already know about it, jump over and click the bookmark button for the RSS feed. It is well worth it!

I was really excited to read about a recent donation of over 14,500 images to Indiana University from a man by the name of Charles W. Cushman. Cushman was an amateur photographer that extensively documented America and a number of other countries he traveled to between the years of 1938 and 1969.

This is an amazing discovery on a number of levels. Not only is this a great historical record of American and world history, but it really shows some insight into a single person’s mind. You get this great feeling of where Cushman was and what he may have been thinking at the time he took each photo.

But, that’s not all. What really REALLY makes this collection stand out is the way it is presented online. Indiana University has done an excellent job in digitizing Cushman’s 14,500 Kodachrome slides and displaying them on their website in a very searchable and organized manner. The metadata is incredible. I am sure Cushman had something to do with this as there is information in there having to do with details such as the street the photo was taken on, and who is in the picture. I don’t really know the full story about how all this information was compiled, but there it is, up on the web for all of us to enjoy. Without this metadata, these images would be really hard to sift through and understand.

I browsed through his collection by region and found 21 images from my home state of Maryland. I sifted through the images and found some interesting shots from Annapolis, a place where I spent a good deal of time while growing up.

Cushman’s collection got me thinking about the current state of amateur photography. Digital imaging has given us so much in terms of metadata, and with GPS becoming the norm, we will certainly be able to easily identify locations in the future.

It is still up to the photographer to keep notes and caption their images, but things are just so much easier to deal with these days. It makes me wonder what kinds of huge collections of historical images will be donated to universities thirty or forty years from now.