Millions of pictures imperfect
Why did I take 300 pictures of the desert, all those years ago?
The vistas that looked so fantastic in real life look like a bunch of boring rocks in my photos. None of them are very good. Could shooting them with a cheap camera through the window of a rental car doing 60 have had anything to do with it? Or maybe putting them in the bottom drawer of a chest in the attic wasn’t the best way to store them for 30 years?
I’m going through boxes and boxes of old photographs from longago vacations, family get-togethers, birthday parties — the kind of photos we all used to take with a camera that used a roll of film that you had to take to the grocery store or the pharmacy to have developed. A few days and $14.87 later, you’d get the pictures back. Half of them would be blurry or overexposed. On every roll, there would be one picture that came out perfect. Sometimes it was my thumb; other times, my shoe.
After a month or two, they’d go into a desk drawer, never to be seen again. A few would make it into scrapbooks, but most still sit in that attic drawer, inside the envelope they came in — along with their negatives, so you can make many, many copies of your thumb picture. I can’t remember ever having a copy of a photo made from a negative. Many of them are so bad that even the most deluded hoarder would have no problem tossing them out.
And now I’ve got well over a hundred of these envelopes.
Why not throw these pictures out? The places we visited all have websites now, with much better photos than I ever took.
“But that’s not the same,” you might say, “because you’re not in those website pictures.”
Trust me, that’s a good thing. Did I really used to comb my hair that way? That shot’s going in the trash. Did I really think that was a good-looking shirt? Trash. Sue’s eyes are shut in that one. Trash. In this one, everyone has red eyes. And it’s not from the flash — these people actually have red eyes. They don’t look like they’re having fun, they look like a Stephen King book cover.
In the trash it goes. It’s OK; I’ll save the negatives. I can throw them out later.
These days, storing way too many personal pictures is a breeze. It’s all digital. I take all my photos with a cellphone and will never throw any of them out. There are no developing costs, no negatives to take care of and I can take more bad pictures than ever. I think I had over 14,000 at last count. Someday, I’ll sit down and type in all the names of the people in them, where they were taken and why. They’ll be organized into albums and slide shows by year, cross-referenced, and — what am I talking about? That is never gonna happen. Not in a million years.
Instead, I will scroll through everything looking for the one I want, and then get lost in some memory rabbit hole by a photo I wasn’t even looking for, which leads to another, and another. I should just keep the ones that jog my memory and toss the rest. But why bother? They are all stored in the cloud, so I’ll never have to throw any of them away.
Some random computer glitch will probably erase them all for me by accident.
Contact Jim Mullen at mullen.jim@gmail.com.