It's time for a picspam!
OK, so every time I go for a trip somewhere, especially somewhere new, I like to take a lot of pictures, sometimes of people I know, but most of the time just of things around me that catch my attention. (It's much easier to take pictures of inanimate objects than people, after all, and running after people and begging them to stop in every place I want to photograph gets old really fast.)
And every time I do this, I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in the trip, there will probably be at least one person who will inevitably take it upon themselves to explain to me how useless it is to take pictures without people, and how those pictures are just a waste of space, and how one can always buy postcards or professional photographs that would be much better than anything I could take, and how taking pictures without people is just completely pointless.
And... I just don't understand that! Yes, of course a professional photographer would take better pictures than I would. But then they wouldn't be my pictures! They wouldn't make me remember what it felt like for me to be in all those places, wouldn't bring back the wonder I felt that compelled me to take them in the first place.
But apparently, none of those reasons are considered good enough to want to take pictures of my own without people I know. So, I'm generally forced to admit that the main reason I take all those pictures is that I know it will make me happy to see them later. (Which apparently also isn't a good enough reason for me to take all those pictures, but it's at least generally enough to convince people that I'm too crazy to argue with, so they leave me alone. *g*)
So (heh) to prove to those people who don't believe me that there are pictures without people I've taken that I still like, even years later, I decided to make a small picspam of some pictures I took on my trip to Italy last year that still make me happy whenever I see them come up on my random picture Picasa screensaver at home.
So, here are some pictures I took in Italy last year:
This is quite possibly my favorite picture that I've ever taken. This is a picture of the interior of one of the churches in Rome (I don't even remember which one - one thing Rome has a lot of is churches, churches, churches). And the reason I love this picture so much is that the brightly-colored thing in the foreground that looks so much like a painting is actually not a painting - it's a mirror! Some brilliant person noticed the contrast between the darkened interior of the church, and the beautifully-let ceiling, and came up with the idea of bringing in a mirror to better show off the ceiling.
And I absolutely love the result - the contrast between the super-bright colors of the ceiling as reflected in the mirror, and the darkened interior of the church surrounding them. Seriously, whoever thought to put that mirror there is a genius!
Incidentally, this is what the ceiling looks like if you actually looked up, and didn't just look at it through the mirror:
Really, it's beautiful of course, but I think I actually like it better as seen through the mirror. :)
And here is a picture of the Forum in Rome that I took on one of our evening walks:
Yes, I know that professional photographers could almost certainly taken a better picture than this. But those pictures wouldn't be this picture! Looking at them wouldn't make me remember standing with my parents at that spot, looking down at the Forum lit up at night. It wouldn't make me remember how it took me forever to get the settings on my new camera just right for a night picture, while my parents waited impatiently behind me, how... vaguely embarrassed yet smug I was when I discovered that hey, pictures with longer exposure actually do come out much less blurry if you put the camera on something steady instead of trying to hold it completely steady in your hands for 60 seconds. (Who knew?! Not I! (I... may be a little slow. This is probably why I will never actually be a professional photographer. *g*) )
This picture is mine, not anyone else's, and somehow, it feels like it reflects what I saw that evening, and not what anyone else would have seen.
And I happen to think that the picture came out pretty damn well! :D
(In case you are wondering, that brightly-lit building waaay in the background is the Colosseum. :) )
And here is another picture I took in Rome that makes me happy:
The reason I love this picture is that I think it does a great job of showing just why it is that I love Rome so much, why I consider it unique among all the cities I've been to. All those layers of thousands of years' worth of age and history are there, existing together in harmony - buildings where people still live growing out of the columns of Ancient Rome. Nowhere else that I've ever been have I felt the weight of history quite as much as I did when we were in Rome. (Granted, I've never been in China, or Jerusalem, or maybe Istanbul, where I suspect I might also feel the weight of history that way. But still, this is Rome. "Roman ruins" mean something different when you are actually in Rome than anywhere else, I think.)
And I think you can get a bit of a sense of that from that picture.
OK, moving on:
Technically, these next couple of pictures probably shouldn't be in this picspam, because they are actually pictures of people - just not people I know. But every time I see these pictures, they fill me with the same sort of juvenile glee as that statue of the two silver lovers at the front entrance to our building that I mentioned before, and I just couldn't resist.
These are the official guards of Vatican City, wearing the official Vatican City guard uniforms, and I love everything about them. Those berets, and the many-colored coats with the puffy sleeves, and the pantaloons, and those boots, and that medal on the guard in the second picture, and the fact that these uniforms were apparently designed by Michelangelo. Love, love, love!
I think all guards should wear uniforms like these! ♥ ♥ ♥
Don't you agree? :D
I feel sort of bad about photographing them like this, but I figure that we are supposed to take pictures of the guards! They are as much part of the atmosphere of Vatican City as the architecture around them. (Plus, they're pretty cute, aren't they. ♥)
*cough* Anyway. These next few pictures are from Venice, taken a few days earlier in the same trip to Italy last year. And obviously, there are a lot of beautiful things I could and did photograph in Venice. But somehow, these next few pictures are the ones I best remember taking, the ones that make me happiest when I see them again.
This is the top of a column in front of the Doge's palace in Venice. Seen from further away, it sort of all blurs together into some sort of elaborate collection of leaves and figures, but if you look closer, you can see that there are actually little stories told in sculpture form! This particular column has illustrations of several scenes in the Bible, but other columns have their own decorations.
When I saw that, I got really excited, and just had to get details of every little sculpture on every column. So, as my mom sat nearby pretending she didn't know the crazy lady slowly walking in circles around each and every column reading the guide book to decide where we should go next, I took what feels like at least 20 pictures each of several of the columns, from every angle I could imagine. I can't really include all those pictures, because this picspam is already getting too long, but here are a few of them:
And here is another column:
As you can see, this column shows different stages of a man's life, and it's amazing how much they managed to convey with just a few figures.
Here is my favorite of the "stages of a man's life". (Although I also loved the one with the burial scene you can sort of see on the side of the column. (That picture unfortunately didn't come out as well as I wished.) )
There is something strangely touching about these two figures, don't you think? :)
And, OK, I also loved all these pictures I took in a small town called Spoleto, Italy, but somehow especially this one, which is actually currently serving as the wallpaper for my desktop computer at home:
Every time I see this picture, it just calms me down, somehow. It's the view from the top of the hill that our hotel was on. (OMG, that hotel! I have a lot of pictures of it in that album I linked to, and it was just amazing ♥ )
And these are just my very favorite pictures from that trip. There are a lot of other pictures that maybe didn't come out as well, but that still make me happy to look at, because they make me remember how I felt when I took them.
But this picspam is probably already too long, so I think I'll just end it here. *g*
So in conclusion, I think that "because it will make me happy to see them later" is a perfectly good reason to take any pictures I want with my own camera, for my own use. I am a little puzzled that there are actually people who don't seem to agree with that.
*goes back to look at the pictures some more, and remember how much I loved that trip* ♥
And every time I do this, I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in the trip, there will probably be at least one person who will inevitably take it upon themselves to explain to me how useless it is to take pictures without people, and how those pictures are just a waste of space, and how one can always buy postcards or professional photographs that would be much better than anything I could take, and how taking pictures without people is just completely pointless.
And... I just don't understand that! Yes, of course a professional photographer would take better pictures than I would. But then they wouldn't be my pictures! They wouldn't make me remember what it felt like for me to be in all those places, wouldn't bring back the wonder I felt that compelled me to take them in the first place.
But apparently, none of those reasons are considered good enough to want to take pictures of my own without people I know. So, I'm generally forced to admit that the main reason I take all those pictures is that I know it will make me happy to see them later. (Which apparently also isn't a good enough reason for me to take all those pictures, but it's at least generally enough to convince people that I'm too crazy to argue with, so they leave me alone. *g*)
So (heh) to prove to those people who don't believe me that there are pictures without people I've taken that I still like, even years later, I decided to make a small picspam of some pictures I took on my trip to Italy last year that still make me happy whenever I see them come up on my random picture Picasa screensaver at home.
So, here are some pictures I took in Italy last year:
This is quite possibly my favorite picture that I've ever taken. This is a picture of the interior of one of the churches in Rome (I don't even remember which one - one thing Rome has a lot of is churches, churches, churches). And the reason I love this picture so much is that the brightly-colored thing in the foreground that looks so much like a painting is actually not a painting - it's a mirror! Some brilliant person noticed the contrast between the darkened interior of the church, and the beautifully-let ceiling, and came up with the idea of bringing in a mirror to better show off the ceiling.
And I absolutely love the result - the contrast between the super-bright colors of the ceiling as reflected in the mirror, and the darkened interior of the church surrounding them. Seriously, whoever thought to put that mirror there is a genius!
Incidentally, this is what the ceiling looks like if you actually looked up, and didn't just look at it through the mirror:
Really, it's beautiful of course, but I think I actually like it better as seen through the mirror. :)
And here is a picture of the Forum in Rome that I took on one of our evening walks:
Yes, I know that professional photographers could almost certainly taken a better picture than this. But those pictures wouldn't be this picture! Looking at them wouldn't make me remember standing with my parents at that spot, looking down at the Forum lit up at night. It wouldn't make me remember how it took me forever to get the settings on my new camera just right for a night picture, while my parents waited impatiently behind me, how... vaguely embarrassed yet smug I was when I discovered that hey, pictures with longer exposure actually do come out much less blurry if you put the camera on something steady instead of trying to hold it completely steady in your hands for 60 seconds. (Who knew?! Not I! (I... may be a little slow. This is probably why I will never actually be a professional photographer. *g*) )
This picture is mine, not anyone else's, and somehow, it feels like it reflects what I saw that evening, and not what anyone else would have seen.
And I happen to think that the picture came out pretty damn well! :D
(In case you are wondering, that brightly-lit building waaay in the background is the Colosseum. :) )
And here is another picture I took in Rome that makes me happy:
The reason I love this picture is that I think it does a great job of showing just why it is that I love Rome so much, why I consider it unique among all the cities I've been to. All those layers of thousands of years' worth of age and history are there, existing together in harmony - buildings where people still live growing out of the columns of Ancient Rome. Nowhere else that I've ever been have I felt the weight of history quite as much as I did when we were in Rome. (Granted, I've never been in China, or Jerusalem, or maybe Istanbul, where I suspect I might also feel the weight of history that way. But still, this is Rome. "Roman ruins" mean something different when you are actually in Rome than anywhere else, I think.)
And I think you can get a bit of a sense of that from that picture.
OK, moving on:
Technically, these next couple of pictures probably shouldn't be in this picspam, because they are actually pictures of people - just not people I know. But every time I see these pictures, they fill me with the same sort of juvenile glee as that statue of the two silver lovers at the front entrance to our building that I mentioned before, and I just couldn't resist.
These are the official guards of Vatican City, wearing the official Vatican City guard uniforms, and I love everything about them. Those berets, and the many-colored coats with the puffy sleeves, and the pantaloons, and those boots, and that medal on the guard in the second picture, and the fact that these uniforms were apparently designed by Michelangelo. Love, love, love!
I think all guards should wear uniforms like these! ♥ ♥ ♥
Don't you agree? :D
I feel sort of bad about photographing them like this, but I figure that we are supposed to take pictures of the guards! They are as much part of the atmosphere of Vatican City as the architecture around them. (Plus, they're pretty cute, aren't they. ♥)
*cough* Anyway. These next few pictures are from Venice, taken a few days earlier in the same trip to Italy last year. And obviously, there are a lot of beautiful things I could and did photograph in Venice. But somehow, these next few pictures are the ones I best remember taking, the ones that make me happiest when I see them again.
This is the top of a column in front of the Doge's palace in Venice. Seen from further away, it sort of all blurs together into some sort of elaborate collection of leaves and figures, but if you look closer, you can see that there are actually little stories told in sculpture form! This particular column has illustrations of several scenes in the Bible, but other columns have their own decorations.
When I saw that, I got really excited, and just had to get details of every little sculpture on every column. So, as my mom sat nearby pretending she didn't know the crazy lady slowly walking in circles around each and every column reading the guide book to decide where we should go next, I took what feels like at least 20 pictures each of several of the columns, from every angle I could imagine. I can't really include all those pictures, because this picspam is already getting too long, but here are a few of them:
And here is another column:
As you can see, this column shows different stages of a man's life, and it's amazing how much they managed to convey with just a few figures.
Here is my favorite of the "stages of a man's life". (Although I also loved the one with the burial scene you can sort of see on the side of the column. (That picture unfortunately didn't come out as well as I wished.) )
There is something strangely touching about these two figures, don't you think? :)
And, OK, I also loved all these pictures I took in a small town called Spoleto, Italy, but somehow especially this one, which is actually currently serving as the wallpaper for my desktop computer at home:
Every time I see this picture, it just calms me down, somehow. It's the view from the top of the hill that our hotel was on. (OMG, that hotel! I have a lot of pictures of it in that album I linked to, and it was just amazing ♥ )
And these are just my very favorite pictures from that trip. There are a lot of other pictures that maybe didn't come out as well, but that still make me happy to look at, because they make me remember how I felt when I took them.
But this picspam is probably already too long, so I think I'll just end it here. *g*
So in conclusion, I think that "because it will make me happy to see them later" is a perfectly good reason to take any pictures I want with my own camera, for my own use. I am a little puzzled that there are actually people who don't seem to agree with that.
*goes back to look at the pictures some more, and remember how much I loved that trip* ♥