Photographs

Great Egret (Ardea alba)

Every now and then (okay, once a year) the Mom of No takes out the photo album (okay, battered manila folder) where the kids' school pictures are stored (okay, tossed in there) and reminisces about the preschool years, and how much the kids have grown, and then puts the manila folder back with all the other stuff that should be organized neatly but isn't, and there it stays until the next school year's photos come home.   I think that the school pictures are a ripoff, but I buy them anyway because they're the only actual print pictures of my kids I've acquired since about 2008.

The Mom of No has hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of digital pictures stashed on a photo storage site.  Every now and then I think that I should get some of them printed off, and put in a photo album, so that in my old age I can enjoy them- but I haven't done anything about that in years. 

Part of the problem is that there are just too many pictures.  The Mom of No remembers back when cameras had film in them, and you had to pay to get the pictures developed to see what was on the film.  When you went on vacation or had a big milestone event you took maybe two rolls of film and crossed your fingers that some of them were actually good, and that no one had demonic red eyes or was making rabbit ears behind a sibling's head. 

Now, with digital cameras on your phone, you can take more pictures of your kids on a walk to the park than people used to take in an entire year.  I probably have hundreds of bad iPhone pictures of blurry great egrets alone, or pictures of white dots that I say are egrets but you're really taking my word for it.  That is my other photographic challenge- I take a lot of pictures of things I think are cool, but other people might think are strange- like fungi, or beaver skulls, or spiders.  How many pictures of one red admiral butterfly does a person really need? According to what's on my phone, about twenty.

With such an abundance, it's hard to start picking which pictures to print, and which ones to not print but keep digital copies of, and which ones could...dare I say this....delete.  Because delete means gone, good-bye, sayonara, adios.  At least with film you had a negative, but once that file's deleted it's gone. So that makes it hard to delete any pictures, even if you have 200 pictures of your kids at the local pumpkin patch back in 2009- because the pictures are all just a tiny bit different, even if half of them are of the kids sitting on pumpkins and looking like they'd really rather be climbing on hay bales, or even somewhere else entirely.

Therefore,  the digital pictures remain unprinted, unsorted, and unculled.  Chances are good that they will stay that way indefinitely.  I just hope I can remember the password to the online storage site so when my grandchildren say "Grandma, what did my mommy look like when she was a little girl?", I can just whip out my iPhone 36s and say, "well, dearie, let me show you!".