Who was it? Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, who wrote in Positively Positive the other day about, among other things, taking tourist photos of your own life. Why? Because the places and people will change, and when they've done so, you will have pictures of them, and it will help you stay connected with your past. So Rubin has taken photos of the bench on the Yale campus where she was sitting when her future husband first passed by and attracted her eye. Things like that.
And I thought it was a splendid idea. My background has been photo-challenged from the beginning.
Although my parents had lots of pictures of my brothers when they were growing up in Nebraska and visiting my dad's parents in Michigan, but I am not in the crowd, usually. I came along about 7 years after the pack, and there are a few pictures of me with Mom or Dad, but hardly any of the five of us kids.
When I was in elementary school, the camera was no longer functioning, and with WWII upon us, there was little money for things like camera repair or film. The day I got out of the hospital after having polio, however, Mom did take a picture of me and my brother Bob, second oldest and in his AAF uniform, waiting for the bus back to his base. He had been home on leave to visit our brother Gene, the youngest of the boys, who was still in the hospital recovering from the surgery necessitated by the paralysis.
I'm thinking of the vast contrast between then and now, when every day I get new photos--often video clips--of my new great-grandsons (see "new boyz on the block" on the right-hand side of the page). I can't quite keep up with them in terms of posting, but they are all saved. I also am becoming fonder of still photographs, which are easier to nail down than the little videos. It's given me a whole new perspective on all the photos I do have in my "files." They need better organizing, for one thing. Time to get with it!!
Good luck with your photo project.
ReplyDeleteI have bags of old photos waiting to be posted. They are fun to look at, but organizing them is a major undertaking. You have inspired me!
I doubt whether my parents owned a camera. There were exactly four photos from the first 22 years of my life in their shoebox. One B&W taken when I was about 3, in full Scottish gear. One whole family B&W shot when I was about 10. One B&W school group 180° panoramic photo. One colour photo of me graduating from my first degree. All taken by professional photographers.
ReplyDeleteMeryl: I found your blog post: http://sixdecadesandcounting.blogspot.com/2013/11/an-american-tourists-snapshots-of-paris.html. Sorry I can't link it. Don't know how to do formatting in comments. Thanks for stopping by! Your enthusiasm is evident in the photos.
ReplyDeleteStu: I'll bet you looked adorable in your full Scottish gear. C'mon, post it for us! I wasn't counting the professional portraits or school pictures. Only my oldest brother, John, and I had full color portraits taken at age 3 by a professional photog, although there were a bunch of snapshots of my brothers wearing chaps and cowboy hats and seated on a pony. I know that these kind of "old west" photographers toured the country taking such pictures at fairs and amusement parks during the 30s. (possibly earlier and later, too).
Can't find the 1947 one, but here's Xmas 1944
Deletehttp://www.savory.de/stu44.jpg
What a gorgeous child!!
DeleteOh here it is
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And here's the graduation one from 1966; that's all of them!
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wonderful photos, Stu! Really enjoyed your early selves.
DeleteVery cute!
DeleteI literally have hundreds of photos going back to my ancestors in the 1800s - and then there are those hundreds of slides my amateur photographer mom took I've been scanning them bit by bit and there's no end in sight. I put up a private family page on Facebook to share all the photos of us - nearly 400 at last count and I've hardly put a dent in them.
ReplyDeleteThe beauty of using a photo editor like Picasa (free) is that you don't have to manually organize your photos before scanning them - you can do it all online to your heart's content. I also got a free "lite" edition of Photoshop when I bought my new scanner (Epson) but I'd hate to try the full-blown product.
You were smart not to have bought the full-blow Photoshop, IMHO. I bought it. That was before I had cataract surgery and the color combinations that they used in their pages made it absolutely impossible for me to use it. After much frustration, I gave it away.
DeleteCop Car
Parsley's Pix....now I get it!! What a treasure trove of photos you have. Picasa is FREE? How long do the photos last on Picasa? I've been using iPhoto, and alas, most of the photos I've posted on my bog seem to disappear after a few years. Maybe it's not iPhoto's fault, though. Maybe its Blogger. I used to think I was pretty good with technology, but I've lost that attitude especially re photo technology. I was delighted to find two disks that I made two years ago still have the images!! I had an Epson scanner, and now I have HP. I think I need something much less complicated. Like somebody with a scanner van who can pull up to the curb and scan all my stuff to disks, then leave when the job is done. Or maybe I should check with the NSA or whatever....."Have you seen my pix? Do you still have them?"
ReplyDeleteThey may not be mobile; but, there are companies that offer to scan everything for you. Of course, it costs $$! Some small companies specialize in transferring data from older technologies to newer ones.
DeleteCop Car
Picasa, like everything, has a slight learning curve but is relatively easy. You can sharpen, adjust color balance, crop, delete red eye and all kinds of other things. You can tag (who, what, where & when) and search accordingly, add captions and descriptions, burn to discs, post on FB, blah, blah, blah. They do start charging after a certain number of photos, but I haven't gotten there yet.
ReplyDeleteAm thinking about making a family memory quilt using some of the photos, say one from each branch.
This is exciting. I find myself without much time these days, but this is a project that would be worth doing. We had a brownie box camera and took a fair number of photos for those times. And I got my own camera from Sears later on, that took very small but sharp photos.
ReplyDeleteGo for it, Hattie!!
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