Pictureless

For a while longer I will have to use words to describe what is going on in my life. I haven't quite got the hang of downloading things off of my phone. Our camera is returning with John from Germany as we speak.

I'm not very good at taking pictures. What I mean to say is the actual getting around to taking pictures. I'm often so caught up in the moment of what is happening I forget to capture it in pictures. On some practical level I figure if the experience wasn't that memorable I will just forget it anyway. On the other hand, if it was a vivid experience I will be able to summon up the images in my imagination. True, currently, we don't have a device that will download images from our brains to put in picture frames for other people to see.

On the other hand, when I find old photos I am always sent into a dizzy wave of nostalgia. I quickly become thoughtful and remember the time when..... Of course, it's at these moments I think, "Why didn't I take more pictures?" The funny thing is, I can be pretty good at taking pictures.

I learned to do photography on a SLR manual that my dad gave me for a birthday in high school. I actually had access to a dark room of my own, which, at the time was very cool. My dad, who didn't spring for a whole lot of things, never flinched when I used up half a bottle of some very expensive chemical containing silver. My dad taught me how to use that camera and then employed me to work for him at the small newspaper that my family owned. It was the Solon Economist and the North Liberty Leader. These papers, by the way, are still in operation. I payed my way through High School by photographing everything from basketball games to band concerts to little kids doing something cute.

Every Sunday, it was my job to go down to the dark room and develop all of the film and print the pictures for the paper. My senior year of high school my father bought brand new technology, the digital camera. I still developed the film, however we had a device that scanned the film to create digital images on the computer. Even thought I was in on this technology from the beginning I left it when I left for college. Only fifteen years later did I acquire a Digi of my own.

When I wasn't shooting pictures for the paper I did a fair bit of dramatic photography. This involved dressing my sister's friends up in spooky clothing and shooting them from weird angles with whatever kind of lighting I could create. They and their friends were good sports until the very end. Once, someone paid me $50.00 to shoot their cousins wedding. In the dead of winter I convinced my friend Sara to let me shoot her Senior pictures. This involved dressing her up in 70's gown and making her pose on a very cold lake at sunset. The cold really made her cheeks Rosy.

Now we as a culture have digital photography, Blogs, Snapfish and every sort of device to disseminate visual images from our lives to everyone else. Unlike having access to a darkroom there is nothing very extraordinary about owning a digital camera. I suppose, in a way, I am lamenting a lost art. If it isn't art, what's the point?