January 27, 2016. A Day With Pictures.

January 27, 2016.  A Day With Pictures.  I got my first single lens reflex camera in 1976.  It was a Minolta, 35 mm.  I recall taking pictures with it when Angie was about six months old.  I still have those pictures somewhere. 

But film photography was expensive back then.  Film had to be purchased.  Then, it had to be developed and printed.  A by-problem was that everything got printed.  Good shots, average shots and bad shots were printed.  The result was that photographers paid for pictures they really didn't want.  And, once you have a picture of a loved one, it is very hard to discard it.  It just seems so harsh to throw away a picture of a child.  It is like telling the child you don't love her. 

I graduated to shooting slides.  With slides, you can view the picture in transparency, then print the pictures you really want.  Still, the film, the processing and the prints were expensive.

In 1995, I got my first digital SLR camera.  It freed me of the bondage of buying film.  I think Kodak's stock plummeted when I stopped buying film. 

So, over the last forty years I have taken tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of pictures.  Poor Annie was simply overwhelmed with the process of labeling and putting them in albums.  Understandably, she got behind, about thirty years behind. 

Each time we take a trip, she lugs along twenty pounds of pictures and empty albums.  We get busy doing what we do and forget about the pictures.  We have taken  pictures from the east coast to the west coast.  The have been transported from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.  The pictures have more miles on them than a three-year-old Airbus A380.

Today, we started.  We spent hours putting pictures in albums.  Many of the pictures were taken by our daughters when they were in grade school.  There are pictures of stuffed animals, fingers and a dark closet.  But, we kept them.  The batch I worked on were dated from 1983.

Eventually, we ran out of albums.  We were stymied until we got more.  So, to Walmart we went.  While out, we got diesel, propane, ate at the Fish River Grill and bought ice cream and cookies.  Earlier in the day, Stacy told me that today is National Chocolate Cake Day, so we got some of that, too. 

When we returned to the campground, we sampled the ice cream and cake.  As often happens after binging, we lost track of why we went to Walmart to begin with.  Now, the pictures are back in the closet waiting for our next random burst of energy.

It may be a while.