The Pictureless Picture Post
I’m going to write about pictures without actually having any pictures in the post. Ironic, eh?
Last year, I took over 1700 pictures with my digital camera.
The beauty of a digital camera is that the cost of taking a photo is so low. I had a film camera years ago, and I used to take a fair amount of pictures with that, but you had a limit. You might only get 24 shots on a roll; 12 if you had a small roll. So, there was much more discrimination in terms of what you took a photo of. It wasn’t cheap to have film developed–not if you were going to be taking hundreds of photos. So, often, those photos offer only a very fleeting look at life. You took pictures for special occasions and the like.
Mind you, I do have some off-the-wall photos from back then too. I would try different things. For example, I have a photo of a fork floating in the kitchen. One time, the place that developed the pictures had a mix-up and someone else got my photos. They must have been disappointed to see pictures of dry ice bubbling in a sink.
So, even then I took “alternative” pictures. But, then there was a long drought of picture taking. I think my last regular batch of photos that I took were maybe the late eighties and then just sparsely throughout the nineties. I got a video camera as a graduation present, so I did more videos throughout the nineties than photos.
Of course, the nineties were when I first started trying to do a major newsletter, which morphed into a BBS system which morphed into the world wide web. Then, sometime in the mid-nineties, we got an Apple Digital Camera for work. It was one of the early digital cameras, and had really low resolution. Ultimately, it wasn’t high enough resolution for what we bought it for, so I never really ended up using it for many photos. I do have some photos floating about on various CDs. They are in a proprietary format, though, so someday I need to dig out an old computer with the camera’s software and convert them to JPEG or TIFF or something I can use now.
Anyway, in 2002, I got a digital camera. Since then, I’ve put more and more use into it, especially as life goes on and you think why don’t I have photos of that? and so you decide to use the camera more and more so you don’t have to keep asking yourself that in the future. In fact, despite having a digital camera since 2002, 2006 was the first year in which I took at least one photo every month. (Actually, the least amount in a month that year was 10 photos in October.)
So far this year, I’ve taken over 550 photos.
Mind you, not all my photos are of things most people would consider interesting. I like to “archive” things; that is, I take pictures of mundane things just to have a visual record of them. It would be better, of course, if I were to actually record more data than just the photo, but the photos will have to suffice for now. Anyway, I take pictures of stuff like drinking cups from fast food restaurants. Most people throw those away, right? And that’s why we need photos. People will throw things out and then we forget what things looked like back in the day. They may be commonplace today, but they are tomorrow’s history. So, I take pictures.
Ditto for stuff like snack packages.
Lately, I have also been experimenting with stereographic and anagraphic images. I don’t have a “3D” camera, but I’ve been able to simulate the effect manually. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t work as well. And now I wish I had known of this and taken more of my older photographs this way.
And, I still take pictures of clouds and flowers and butterflies and all that.
Plus, product shots. I still do those, as well as other images for websites and such. Last year’s Christmas card at work used a photo I took.
Anyway, I just cleared out my camera a few minutes before starting this post, so I’m ready for another batch of photos…
Hmmm…..now I wonder how many photos I’ve taken this year so far. I know I took over 500 just the other day golfing!