Years ago a friend recommended the www.luminous-landscape.com site of Michael Reichmann. This site, which has now been running for over ten years, is a resource on the techical side of photography by somebody who understands it. The word also has its origins in lumen the Latin word for light and has a number of related meanings that make it appropriate to photography.

This is the small pieces of fluff that can ruin our photographs but I don't mean it in that sense. On www.photoquotes.com I came across a quotation by the late Dirck Halstead, a remarkable photojournalist, who ran the digitaljournalist.org website:

"I have a theory that every time the shutter captures a frame, that image is recorded at a very low threshold in the brain of the photographer... as ‘photographic lint‘. When the photographs of Monica Lewinsky, in her beret on the lawn of the White House emerged, I ‘knew‘ I had seen that face with the President. I had no idea when, or where ... I hired a researcher, and she started to go through the piles of slides in the light room. After four days, and more than 5,000 slides, she found ‘one‘ image, from a fund-raising event in 1996. Gotcha!"

The idea of 'photographic lint' has stuck with me - as it was meant to - the phrase is so appropriate for a person who has taken tens of thousands of photographs and still remembers where each was taken and I fall into that category.