Wednesday, November 16, 2005

ABOUT PICTURES






Got these shots through the window yesterday. The leaves on the trees are pretty much down and the birds and squirrels are heading back down to the yard. These are for Lisa since the trees next to her place got cut down last year and her little furry friends have moved on for awhile.

I ended up with more camera than I anticipated. If you can spare the time to take the really big pictures you can crop the shot to look like a close up and still be focussed. I've barely scratched the surface but these two are actually better than anything I can get with my 35mm until I can swing a scanner with a transparency unit. I just have to be sure to print off the best ones.

If anyone is interested, it's a Fugi F10. Probably fairly high-end, since I went to the local camera store to shop. Technically it's a 6.9 megapixel unit, but it has two settings at that level. Standard and fine. I could probably tell the difference if I tried to print something.

Which brings me to something else that's been kicking around. I'm falling in love with the convenience of digital, but I'm afraid we may be in danger of a kind of amnesia. The things that jog our memories become ephemeral.

We went through a large stack of old photos that my cousin had stashed. Many of them were from the teens and twenties Some went back to the 1800's. It was almost magical to hear mom and Leah's niece talking about who they remembered and wondering who some of these people were. There was a picture of a man in a WWI uniform. I think he was a distant cousin. With the picture was a death notice. He died in camp in France in 1918. In camp, not in battle. Dollars to donuts it was the flu epidemic of 1918. It was something none of us knew about. And we wouldn't have known about it if Leah hadn't been a bit of a pack rat and if she hadn't had something to hang on to.

There were pictures from a road trip they took in the twenties. Including some road side attraction in BC that had a very large tree with a cleft in it. There was an ELEPHANT standing with its back to that cleft. Note to the folks who live back East. The old growth timber out here is something else. What's left of it. The real irony over the battle over the old growth is that there are no mills left out here that can take logs that big. I assume they'd be cut for export. When I can swing a new scanner, man do I have some pictures for you.

Imagine a tree that takes a half dozen trucks just to carry it to the mill or a stump that can hold the whole cutting crew. If you can get copies of some of the X-Files early seasons look for the stories set in the BC woods. You'll get a little taste of what some of the forests used to look like out here.

My, my this entry sort of took the bit and took off on its own. We've gained a lot in convenience as technology improves. What are we losing?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the squirrels!

I dunno...I think digital cameras are great.  I may not be leaving pictures for posterity, but I'm getting a lot more personal enjoyment out of the pictures I take.  My old "paper" pictures all sit in big old boxes, and I rarely look at them.  I've fallen in love with the "picture gallery" screen saver on my laptops...I get a slide show of all my digital pictures daily.  AND, with digitals, I can email pics to distant relatives who would never get to see them otherwise.

Yep, just line me up in the "lovin' the digital picture age" crowd...  Lisa  :-]

Anonymous said...

I love pictures. Sometimes I forget how funny my hair was and how loud my clothes were until I see a picture and it is like yu are right back in that time frame.

Amy
http://avisionarydiva.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

When I was a little lad, I used to drag out this big box of family photos that my folks kept in their bedroom.  I was a late (accidental) addition to the family ---- so it was neat to see all the stuff that happened before I was even an idea.  It was fun to look until I found an envelope of photos of some ancient relative's funeral.  It was an old dead man in a coffin.  YIKES!  

I like digital pictures too, but I still want the envelopes and the actual photos in my hand....and those useless negatives that always got mixed up.

hugs,
Russ