Each time I look at the hundreds of pics we took and try to decide which one/s are worth expounding about, I feel faint. And that's after we reduced the collection from over a thousand to a mere six hundred.
Of course, when two people do the sorting, compromises must be made. "No way we keep this horrid picture of me!!! I look fat!" says one of us, guess who. "Okay, but if we delete that one, we also delete the one of me where I'm pulling a face," goes the counter-offer. "Be my guest, but I'm for deleting this brown spot." "It's not a brown spot, it's a bear!" And so it goes.
Photos carry memories, but writing about them can easily become tedious. You know, like in the bad old days when you were invited to friends to see the slides from their trip or from their son's bar-mitzvah/graduation/wedding:
"Ooh, here we are at the castle [which? What? Where?], you remember? The one with the tea parlor where the tea was lousy and the waitress was rude?"
"Ah, here's Auntie Rose! Doesn't she look great?" [Who's auntie rose? Who cares?]
Nowadays you get a link by email which you can "accidentally" delete, or follow and just skim through in a few minutes. You choose one pic at random, comment on it or click "Like" on Facebook, et voila – you've fulfilled your social obligations. The rest of the digital photos will continue to snooze safely(?) on some faraway server, at least until the next solar flare wipes the slate(?) clean.
Back to sorting photos and the dilemmas involved.
Take the Grand Canyon, for example.
First of all, I didn't realize it's a whole Industry. In my innocent imagination, I thought you parked your car in a dirt parking lot, walked over a few meters to a sort of rail or fence, and looked down and beyond at the Canyon. Since the canyon is long, tourists could spread out along its length… You look, ooh and ahh, take pictures, and that's it.
Maybe it used to be like that, more or less, scores of years ago. But for quite a while now it has been practically a Country with big Commercial Centers and a Transportation System.
In the evening, we went – with droves of other tourists – to Yavapai Point, to watch the sunset. It was beautiful. The sky changes from blue to pink to lilac to to orange-red to dark mauve… But how many of those two-dozen photos do you end up uploading onto your fave website?... Just for you, I struggled and chose one:
As for the canyon itself, my amateur pictures simply cannot do it justice, no matter how hard I tried and how many pictures I took. Cousin Bonnie, a more experienced photographer who fiddles with the light, contrast and focus settings, achieved better results. Still, you have to be a National Geographic photographer, with fancy equipment, possibly including a helicopter and a space shuttle, to capture it in all its glory.
Here's one pic of the canyon:
If you look carefully, you'll actually see the water at the bottom of the canyon.
"I swear I don't have such a big belly – it's the T-shirt!":
"Can't you see it's a bear?!":
Next stop: Wahweap, Lake Powel and Glen Canyon.
Getting ready to send you a zillion pix of the baby (nah! I wouldn't do that to you - even though, he is so sweet you, well I, just want to slobber love all over him). As for the T-shirt, who does the caption apply to? And the bear - you know, if you hadn't told me, I'd sworn it was a giant insect.
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