Category Archives: Photography & Ephemera
Man in green derby
And stack rocks
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. — Zen proverb.
Indians weren’t real
Growing up in a small town in the 1950’s, I had a Davy Crockett coonskin cap and rather amazing “Indian” war bonnet. Don’t recall who gave it to me or why.
Native Americans (don’t think we ever heard the term back then) were mentioned in our history lessons but rarely and inaccurately. The American “Indian” simple wasn’t real to us. Mostly they were the bad guys on TV and in movies. Tonto one of the rare exception.
My thanks to John Robison for sharing photos from his mom’s scrapbooks.
Stillness
Camcorder video
This found photo reminded me of how difficult it used to be to record, edit and share video. Only the true geek (or your uncle) carried one of these cameras around. When you did get some video you had to get it off the camera and into that big old desktop computer (SCSI) where you could edit it with really bad software. If you wanted to share it you made the video teeny tiny to keep the file size down. Then all you could do was email it. No place to share. Better than Super8 but just barely.
It’s the sudden stop
We live a couple miles outside of Jefferson City (MO) on a “no exit” road. This morning someone drove into a utility pole, cutting off access to/from homes. Whole bunch of folks couldn’t get to work… or back to their homes. The people in the house across the road from the accident have a drive that circles around behind their house and back out to the road. They volunteered (or the responders asked) to let folks use their property to get around and out. Good neighbors.
Color prints from Walgreen’s: Good, fast and inexpensive
I was never one to want or need prints of digital photos. Back in the day the print quality was too poor to bother with (unless you purchased an insanely expensive printer) and the consumables were expensive and it was just more trouble than it was worth. And once it got easy to share photos online, why both printing?
But for some reason I got a hankering to have some prints of the ‘new’ truck so I headed for Walgreen’s where I printed out half a dozen 4×6 prints (and one 5×7). Cost less than 50 cents a print and they were as good as anything I ever had commercially printed. Can’t see any reason (for me) to own and high-end color printer.
The Crossroads
Barb and her pal Carla are headed to Destin for a week of fun+sun but they’ve stopped for the night in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to take in some blues at Red’s and Ground Zero. She knew she was back home in the Delta when two mosquito trucks went by.
Photo descriptions
I’m still thinking about photos. Specifically, the story behind photos. The ease of taking, sharing and storing photos has created a tsunami of digital photos. The moment (and the photo that captures it) passes through our hands so quickly, there’s no time to consider the story behind the photo (if there is one). Besides, I know who’s in the photo and where it was taken and I’ll be around forever so why bother with descriptions and such. And there’s something to that. I have dozens of photos of the beach near our place in Destin, FL. There might be a story but there might not. Sometimes the photo IS the story.
Our relationship with photos was very different when cameras used film. Days (weeks?) might pass between the time you took the photo and and when you held the print in your hands. It took some commitment to sit down with a stack of photos and make notes on the back about the people, the place, the event. Perhaps it comes down to who the photo is for. If it’s just for me, well, I know all that and when I’m gone, who cares. If you think of the photo as having a life longer than yours, the back story is priceless.
The photo of my mother and father kissing on a park bench (on their honeymoon) is a good example. What if my mom had written a few lines (on the back) describing where they were and what they had been doing?
I’m not going to write descriptions for the 1,900 photos in my collection. At least not all of them. But I have hit on a way to connect to the story behind the photos. My blog. I’ve been blogging for fifteen years and and have written (and tagged) 30 posts about Destin. I’ve added a link to those posts to the descriptions of the photos in my collection. I have a couple of hundred photos of KBOA and I’ll add http://www.kboa830.com to the description field of those photos. And so on. (If you’re a half-empty type, you’re thinking, “Yeah, but your blog will be gone when you die.” I’m working on that.)
This is all well and good if you’re retired with lots of time to manage your photos. True. But I think the case can be made that a photo that’s not worthy of a brief description might not be worth keeping. And a lot of them aren’t, in my opinion. Folks are fire-hosing photos to the cloud with little or no thought. Google Photos is an attempt to address this.