At the risk of sounding overly dramatic (something I have never been accused of before - lucky for me no one can see the eye rolling in my blog) I am in a hell of my own making! Now I realise that’s overstating the situation; I’ve been reading a couple of blogs of people blogging about their fight with cancer and I know the chaos I’m struggling with is nothing compared to what they are going though. They’d read my blog and simply laugh (not at my baseless and shameless attempt at being humourous but at the sheer lunacy at thinking that my situation bears any resemblance to either chaos or hell).
But in my boring run-of-the-mill type life (touch wood it stays that way) chaotic hell is the best way to describe what I currently have to undertake. I have to sort though all my digital photos from my recent trip to New Zealand.
Now, at the time I took the photos, I thought; “This is great! Oh that looks neat! Wow look at that.” Snap! Snap! Snap! (ok, the Snapping is my blogging manifestation of what my digital camera sounds like as it takes a picture – in actuality I have turned off the sound so I’m not sure it makes any noise when it takes a picture, but having typed that, I think it must, otherwise how would I know that I actually captured what I had hoped to do).
In my photographic exuberance I took over 1600 pictures in 24 days, if you do the math, that’s an average of over 66 photos PER DAY! Far, far, far too many photos than anyone person could possibly need to take in such a short space in time.
I blame the camera, no, it wasn’t taking pictures on it’s own, but by the shear fact that it’s a digital camera lends itself to being pulled out and used at any given moment no matter how un-momentous the moment is. I think digital photography was invented to pander to the instant-gratification sensation that seems to run rampant though society these days. I was accused the other day of being an impatient westerner because I didn’t think I could ever dedicate five days to a cricket match (actually, I said I wouldn’t waste 3 hours on the oddity – having attempted to watch it during dinner one night in NZ and having it make absolutely no sense, only to find out, after being informed by a co-worker after my return home, that some cricket matches can last DAYS!).
Cricket aside, I don’t deny I am not a patient person, red lights irk me and slow computers make me want to scream. But I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say I want instant gratification… but when it comes to digital cameras, essentially that’s what you get. It’s not like the “good ol’ days” when you had to purchase film, load it into your camera, take the finite number allotted on the film roll and then remove said used roll and take it in to get developed by strangers in times spanning one hour to one week. Thus was the 35mm world (the dark-room ages, as it were). Today’s digital camera is like the old Polaroid instant cameras, click the button and out spits a picture! But unlike the old Polaroid, today’s digital cameras don’t require film, in which, in my opinion, the evil lies!
The expense of having to buy film (and the added expense of developing 35mm film) made taking pictures (pre-digital) more of a selective process. Since each photo cost a definitive amount of money, most people (me included) would be reasonably selective about the photos I took. Ok, the 18 rolls I took during my 3 week European vacation about 10 years ago might suggest I am less than selective – but I just did the math, 36x18 is only 648 photos; less than half my NZ trip and I visited 4 countries when in Europe, 5 if you include England, which I guess I’d better since it is a country. So on a per-country basis, the Europe trip works out to under 130 pictures – a much more acceptable number.
It today’s day and age, when digital cameras are so widely available (some camera batteries less so) and memory cards so inexpensive, the financial dampeners are cast off leaving me at the mercy of my own self control. Apparently, when it comes to digital photography, I must admit I’m rather snap-happy which leaves me to wade though the many to find the few. Otherwise I risk putting all my friends to sleep or worse still boring them to death. On the bright side, maybe I can make digital slideshow of all my photos and market it as a cure for insomnia. But I suppose it’s not working for me, I’ve spent the last two days reviewing the darn things and I’m still not able to reset my mental clock to get it off of NZ time, which keeps telling me it’s only 6 PM when it’s 10 PM and by extension making 2 AM bedtime – which for me is absolutely unacceptable (as I’m needing to be up at 5 AM)!
Oh well, I guess I can start using the insomniac hours to cull the herd – at last count I was down to around 1200 – I wonder what a socially acceptable number to subject to friends and acquaintances is? Hmm, maybe a couple more weekends of culling will do it.
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