Six Hundred Photos
About six months ago, Toby's employer put all the staff through a training program that taught them, among other things, how to take really good photos. Then, when my birthday came, he gave me a new digital camera (to replace the mediocre one that was bought to replace the good one that I broke) - the same model they use where he works. So he is a great photographer now, which is funny, because I used to be the official photographer by dint of being able to frame a shot; he is far superior to me now, because he knows how it really works.
Which is how we came to have over six hundred photos of our twelve days in France. I expect that everyone on our list knows what six hundred photos on two digital cards is: a millstone around your neck unless you deal with it immediately. We've all done this with some gigantic raft of memorabilia; you don't have time to process the stuff, so you push it around for a few months, then you dump it in a box and say, "We'll sort these out when we retire," even though you know that by then you won't recognize any of it. I have acid-free boxes of photos and birthday party invitations and wonderful stick-figure drawings, dating back to 1999, each year in a separate box, but I'm beginning to suspect that by the time I have hours free for scrapbooking, I won't know what any of it is. Possibly, I won't know what anything is by that time.
You know what else? No one wants to see your six hundred vacation photos. In truth, no one wants to see any of your photos, but out of kindness, they'll look at some of them. My goal is not to abuse that kindness, so I set out with the aim of creating a small packet of twelve photos to represent the twelve days of our trip. Twelve to share, maybe thirty or thirty-five to put in an album with ticket stubs and matchbooks, so we can take it out when we're old and say, "I don't remember that. Do you remember that? Where is that?"
Yesterday when I was too jet lagged to do anything but laundry, I downloaded all the photos, then, using the journal I kept (on paper!) I sorted them into days. That way I could pick the best one from each day and we might possibly be able to remember what's going on. Then, after doing five loads of laundry and the grocery shopping, I actually went through them and picked a representative packet. Okay, it's seventeen photos, but still, that's pretty good, out of six hundred, don't you think?
I took some very nice portraits of Toby in the fortified village of Domme, but they are mostly for personal use. Toby himself made a project of taking a picture of me at every single cafe and restaurant table we inhabited, which gives the impression that all I did was eat. Only half true. I also smoked.
I have to take those pictures out of the collection so the children won't see. David Sedaris says that France is basically one big ashtray, so I decided to join in the prevailing cultural zeitgeist and take up Gauloises for the duration. One afternoon as we sat in a sidewalk cafe, we looked up to see a beautiful, long-haired woman smoking and leaning out of a pair of French doors on the second floor; Toby said she was a "fumiste," paid by the French tourist board to provide le genuine French atmosphere.
So, coming up in installments: Twelve French Days in Seventeen Photographs.
Which is how we came to have over six hundred photos of our twelve days in France. I expect that everyone on our list knows what six hundred photos on two digital cards is: a millstone around your neck unless you deal with it immediately. We've all done this with some gigantic raft of memorabilia; you don't have time to process the stuff, so you push it around for a few months, then you dump it in a box and say, "We'll sort these out when we retire," even though you know that by then you won't recognize any of it. I have acid-free boxes of photos and birthday party invitations and wonderful stick-figure drawings, dating back to 1999, each year in a separate box, but I'm beginning to suspect that by the time I have hours free for scrapbooking, I won't know what any of it is. Possibly, I won't know what anything is by that time.
You know what else? No one wants to see your six hundred vacation photos. In truth, no one wants to see any of your photos, but out of kindness, they'll look at some of them. My goal is not to abuse that kindness, so I set out with the aim of creating a small packet of twelve photos to represent the twelve days of our trip. Twelve to share, maybe thirty or thirty-five to put in an album with ticket stubs and matchbooks, so we can take it out when we're old and say, "I don't remember that. Do you remember that? Where is that?"
Yesterday when I was too jet lagged to do anything but laundry, I downloaded all the photos, then, using the journal I kept (on paper!) I sorted them into days. That way I could pick the best one from each day and we might possibly be able to remember what's going on. Then, after doing five loads of laundry and the grocery shopping, I actually went through them and picked a representative packet. Okay, it's seventeen photos, but still, that's pretty good, out of six hundred, don't you think?
I took some very nice portraits of Toby in the fortified village of Domme, but they are mostly for personal use. Toby himself made a project of taking a picture of me at every single cafe and restaurant table we inhabited, which gives the impression that all I did was eat. Only half true. I also smoked.
I have to take those pictures out of the collection so the children won't see. David Sedaris says that France is basically one big ashtray, so I decided to join in the prevailing cultural zeitgeist and take up Gauloises for the duration. One afternoon as we sat in a sidewalk cafe, we looked up to see a beautiful, long-haired woman smoking and leaning out of a pair of French doors on the second floor; Toby said she was a "fumiste," paid by the French tourist board to provide le genuine French atmosphere.
So, coming up in installments: Twelve French Days in Seventeen Photographs.